Rockfall
by Photogirl1890
Summary: B'Elanna takes command of a Maquis away mission for the first time. As she later tells Harry in "Warhead", it doesn't exactly go as planned. An incident in the DMZ. Pre-Voyager.
1. Chapter 1

**Rockfall **

**Disclaimer:** Star Trek belongs to Paramount/CBS. No copyright infringement is intended.

**Summary: **B'Elanna takes command of a Maquis away mission for the first time. As she later tells Harry in "Warhead", it doesn't exactly go as planned. An incident in the DMZ. Pre-_Voyager_.

**Rating: T.** Contains strong language, descriptions of violence, and discussion of war crimes.

**A/N:** When I started writing this, I had no real idea of how long or how many words it was going to take to tell the story that I wanted to. It turns out it would keep me occupied for over two months, and contain twice as many words as any of my previous works.

My extremely grateful thanks go to **Delwin** – who has chalked up quite a few hours on this herself between the research help, the beta-reading, and the many encouraging e-mails.

This ties in somewhat with a short piece I wrote last summer ("Alive"), though it's in no way essential to read that before reading this one.

I'm going to post this in instalments (there are a total of seven chapters), but it is essentially finished, so the complete piece will be up before too long.

Feedback, as always, is welcome.

* * *

**Rockfall**

**Chapter One**

_Day One_

_1100_

"Bloody hell, Torres. Does this look like a fricking Cardassian military installation to you?"

Clearly it did not. B'Elanna didn't need Vance's commentary to know that she'd messed up big time, the sarcastic bastard. It was becoming blatantly obvious.

Chakotay had been a prize idiot to insist that she take command of this mission. She'd told him that Li Paz or Meyer would have been better choices, but it was _her_ upgrade to the _Val Jean_'s long-range sensors that had enabled them to pick up the Cardassian 'weapons signatures' from three systems over. So, Chakotay had said, it was only right that B'Elanna got to personally take charge of the team assembled to destroy whatever installation was at the source of the signal. B'Elanna was fine with destruction of Cardassian property. It was the 'taking charge of the team' that she had a problem with. This team wouldn't be solely comprised of engineers and technicians such as she supervised on the Maquis raider and when fixing and improvising other pieces of technology for the Maquis cause. This team included members with far more experience than she did with the hit-and-run type mission that this was. At least that it was _supposed_ to be.

B'Elanna fumed, as much at herself as at Chakotay and Vance. Li Paz or Meyer wouldn't have had to listen to this kind of crap from Vance. Li Paz or Meyer would have realised that something was wrong before getting this far down under the mountain. Unfortunately, given the circumstances, B'Elanna could take no satisfaction in knowing that Chakotay should have listened to her protests.

"Shut up, Vance," said Ken Dalby, moving to B'Elanna's side, his headlamp joining hers in illuminating Vance's broad frame in the darkness of the tunnel in which they stood. "Like you'd have interpreted the readings differently."

"It's a sodding mine," Vance yelled, waving his large hands around wildly for emphasis. "A _mine_. And not even the kind that blows up in your face when you step on it. At least if we'd found one of those buggers we'd know this wasn't a _completely wasted trip_."

Given the result of last week's raid on Quatal Prime where Tyler and McCreary had indeed wandered into a Cardassian minefield, it took all of B'Elanna's self-restraint not to punch Vance in the face and break his nose, the insensitive _petaQ_.

"But an abandoned mine would be an ideal place for the Cardassians to hide a bunker," said Tabor, flanking B'Elanna on the other side from Dalby. "We've seen it elsewhere. They use caves, mines, any natural tunnel systems to camouflage their outposts and supply dumps just like we do, especially this far into the DMZ."

"You're missing the point," argued Vance. He jerked a thumb in B'Elanna's direction. "_She_ said she found Cardassian weapons signatures. There ain't no Cardassian weapons here."

This time it took Tabor stepping forwards to obscure Vance from her line of sight to stop B'Elanna launching herself at the man. Chakotay had been wanting her to gain some experience of command for a couple of months now, and he was confident this mission would be a 'milk run' – an ideal opportunity for her to lead a small team in the field with very little risk attached. He hadn't given her a say in who would be on 'her' team though. If he had, Vance would not have been on the list. Vance might be useful in a firefight, but, in every other situation, he was just a large pain in the ass.

As well as picking up weapons signatures, the _Val Jean_'s 'improved' sensor array had shown that there were no Cardassian biosigns on the class L planet where the weapons were thought to be sited. Furthermore, there were no ship movements in or out of the star system, which, aside from the one class L planet, was comprised only of three gas giants and a selection of class D planetoids. Not worth the effort of humanoid colonization or exploitation, the system had gone largely unnoticed, just a dot on the star charts in the ironically named Demilitarized Zone.

"We'll see if the other three found anything down the east tunnel, won't we?" Dalby said to Vance. "We can't know anything for sure until they report in."

Grateful as she was for Dalby and Tabor's support, B'Elanna was still desperate to determine exactly what had gone wrong. It was highly unlikely that the other three members of the team would report back with a positive ID on any military hardware. There were no indications that anyone had been down in the tunnels for a very long time until the Maquis had shown up. Even though the tunnels were clearly unnatural - there were ancient support braces shoring up the roof in places – there were no boot prints in the dusty ground and no traces of biological material other than some oligotrophic microbes.

B'Elanna scrolled furiously through the readings on her PADD, which were a copy of those recorded by the _Val Jean_'s sensors. The sensors on the Yridian-built shuttle that the away team had arrived on had corroborated the initial readings from the larger ship. If the sensor readings weren't complete crap, then the rocks surrounding the tunnels contained a significant proportion of magnesite; not enough to completely disrupt sensor readings, but enough to prohibit safe transportation directly through the mountain above into the tunnels. That ruled out a hidden bunker that the Cardassians only accessed by transporter beam. The shuttle's brief but intensive survey of the locality did not detect any other entrance to the tunnel network, though a few narrow-bore shafts opened up on the surface in places. Ventilation shafts presumably. Li Paz or Meyer would no doubt have suspected that this was an ancient mining facility from the pattern of those vents. The tunnels weren't exactly airy regardless; the temperature at their present location was thirty three degrees Celsius with a relative humidity close to eighty percent. It was verging on uncomfortable even for B'Elanna.

The shuttle's sensors, which B'Elanna had also recently upgraded, indicated that the strongest weapons signatures were coming from within the mountain that they were now exploring, with several weaker signatures in the surrounding few square kilometres. But her tricorder – now at the supposed source – wasn't detecting any weapons signatures at all. "I just don't understand," she murmured, as much to herself as to the others. "These readings don't make any sense." The signatures they had detected from space matched those on file for specific models of Cardassian surface-to-orbit missiles and longer-range self-guided tactical missiles. The variance on the signals was point zero one percent out, but well within acceptable limits. She'd assumed at first that the tricorder's inability to detect the weapons on the ground was due to the fact it was an outdated Bolian model. The Maquis had to take what equipment they could get. The more advanced Starfleet-issue tricorders that B'Elanna had worked with at the Academy were difficult to come by. These Bolian models couldn't even pick up the lifesigns of the Maquis team members unless they were within a dozen metres. That shortcoming made sense in the presence of magnesite interference, but having that explanation didn't help matters. There was nothing she could do to enhance the model's capabilities.

Tabor passed her his own equally crappy tricorder when she beckoned for it. The readings on its display were identical to hers. Could both the _Val Jean_'s and the Yridian shuttle's sensor readings really both be wrong? Or was there some other explanation?

B'Elanna looked away from the tricorder to see Tabor crouch down on the ground. He passed a fist-sized chunk of rock he'd picked off the floor between his hands then fingered its jagged surface before letting out an exclamation of surprise.

"What?" asked Vance.

"This rock. It's solonite." Tabor stood, cradling the rock in his hands. "Could you run the tricorder over this sample?" he asked B'Elanna, holding it out for her to see. "Look at the grain size."

"Solonite?" Dalby scratched his head as he peered closer. "How's that significant?"

"Solonite is the one of the primary sources of uridium ore," B'Elanna explained. Dalby and Vance crowded in as she scanned the sample and ran the analysis. Perhaps they didn't understand the implications of Tabor's discovery or else they might be tempted to hang back instead.

"Are you sure it's solonite?" B'Elanna asked as the tricorder's processor strained to complete its task, a tiny icon of an hourglass flashing on the screen as she waited.

Tabor nodded. "Fairly sure. I recognise this banding pattern." Catching B'Elanna's raised eyebrow as she glanced up – she'd had no inkling that Tabor was interested in geology – the Bajoran went on to explain: "During the Occupation, the Cardassians used slave labour to mine Bajoran uridium, which they sent up to Terok Nor for processing. When I was very young, my family worked in a solonite mine in Musilla Province. The adults worked underground and the children were used on the surface grading the ore." Tabor paused, staring at the rock in his hands before continuing more softly, "I've handled rocks like these tens of thousands of times over."

B'Elanna knew some of Tabor's history from conversations with Seska, who was always keen to discuss the motivations for herself and her fellow Bajorans joining the Maquis. In fact, Seska was quite the master at wheedling out life histories from people whether they really wanted to tell them or not. Hearing Tabor's tale from the man himself made it all the more shocking. Her own childhood troubles seemed less traumatic in comparison. But now wasn't the time to be reflecting on such issues. The problem at hand was starting to make more sense. "The Cardassians use uridium alloy in their sensor arrays and missile guidance systems," she said, regaining some confidence in her investigative abilities. "The reference signatures we have on file for their long-range missiles –"

"You're saying we're standing here surrounded by a shitload of raw uridium," Vance yelped, realisation dawning on his gormless face. "But isn't that –"

"Highly unstable," B'Elanna interrupted in turn, her mood darkening further by the nanosecond as she was knocked off her train of thought. The tricorder finally chirped, the taunting hourglass replaced by a table of data confirming Tabor's theory. B'Elanna snapped its power switch to off and handed it back to Tabor. The less they used electrical devices in here the better, especially those prone to malfunctioning. One stray spark and …

"So does this explain why both the long-range sensors and the close proximity scans flagged Cardassian weapons signatures?" Tabor said, still gazing at the chunk of solonite. "Because the signatures are related to their uridium component?"

It was an oversimplification and something still nagged at her about the whole mess, but she nodded. "I think it's a factor." Had she screwed up the calibration of the sensors when she installed the upgrades? If that were the case, both the ship's and shuttle's arrays would likely have misidentified other targets in the several weeks since they'd been altered.

Vance snorted. "So, there really ain't nothing here for us to blow up. This has been a complete waste of time."

"At least we don't have to worry about any Cardassian ships showing up to collect or deliver supplies or troops," Tabor said. "There's nothing here for them, either."

B'Elanna sighed. "Unless any passing ships pick up our shuttle's warp trail and come to investigate."

"We didn't mask our trail?" Tabor queried.

"On that piece of crap? I'm not a miracle worker," B'Elanna said sharply.

"We'll be long gone before then," Dalby chimed in. "We know there are no patrol ships in the area. Let's get the others back here and get the hell off this rock."

Tabor and Vance murmured their agreement with Dalby's suggestion. B'Elanna was too pissed off with the situation in general to care too much that it was her that was supposed to be making the command decisions. What did it matter now anyway? The mission was a bust. As she reached for her communicator to recall the others, a low rumble reverberated through the rock beneath her feet. Her ears popped, and she saw Tabor raise his hands to his own ears and snap his gaze to hers, dropping the rock from his hands. A breeze stirred his short hair. It was surreal. They were a good half a klick from the outside world. The air down here had been still the whole time they'd been inside … Turning to face back up the tunnel to the way they had entered, B'Elanna _felt_ the rumble increase in volume and pitch more than she actually heard it. The breeze became a blast of abrasive wind that slammed her into the tunnel wall, and as she struggled to catch her breath, her ears ringing, she realised what was happening.

As if she needed this day to get any worse.

..._ _ _...

_1115_

Under Sahreen's quiet direction, Nelson and Jor had finished reconnoitring the tunnels under the eastward side of the mountain. Finding nothing – to their mutual surprise not even a trace of any past Cardassian presence – Sahreen had just asked Jor to comm Torres and inform her that they'd be starting their way back, when the explosion – was it an explosion? – had occurred.

The cloud of dust that had surged towards them and past them, leaving Nelson, Jor and Sahreen caked in a layer of coarse grey granulate, had also done a proficient job of coating the insides of their mouths, noses and eyes - at least Nelson assumed the other two were in the same predicament as himself. Through his ringing ears he could make out their coughing and wheezing, but his eyes were too irritated to hold open. He'd been knocked to the ground by the blast, or whatever it was, and landed on his phaser rifle. Clutching the weapon to his chest with one powdery hand, he hauled himself onto his feet with the other, coughing so hard and so desperately to catch his breath that he vomited, his retching adding to the cacophony. When his struggle for oxygen was won, he forced his eyes wide and then blinked furiously to try and clear them. Rubbing them clean with his hand was out of the question. The light from the headtorch strapped around his forehead couldn't penetrate far in the thick, cloying air, but by bringing a hand close to his face he could discern the layer of grime on his skin. He hoped that in vomiting he hadn't covered the rifle in partially-digested Starfleet ration pack four: oatmeal and stewed prunes. The prunes tasted even worse the second time around. On a cursory inspection the rifle seemed all right, but his boots had taken some splatter.

He croaked out the names of his companions and both of them responded, affirming that they had no serious injuries, though Jor sounded pained. Fumbling for the straps of his rucksack, Nelson pulled it off his back, felt for the zip to the side pocket and pulled out his flask. The first few sips of water he rinsed around his mouth and spat out. Then, after swallowing a little and replacing the flask in its pocket, he felt his way along the damp tunnel wall a dozen metres or so in the direction of the voices until he could make out Jor's form sat on the ground. She seemed to be fiddling with her communicator. Sahreen's hacking cough got louder until he too appeared out of the gloom, groping the tunnel wall, and missing his headtorch. On closer inspection Nelson saw that the older man still, in fact, had the light strapped around his head, but the bulb had smashed.

"What the heck was that?" Nelson asked them. The relief at finding his companions alive and well had quickly been replaced with a deep sense of foreboding. Were they under attack from Cardassian forces? Maybe someone had tripped a security device. His empty stomach clenched.

"Rockfall," Sahreen stated, his eyes shining in the midst of his matt grey face. "Classic signs. Had to be. And unfortunately, it seems like it happened between our position here and our exit to the surface."

If that was Sahreen's theory, then it was probably correct. Nelson hadn't known the guy long, but it seemed like he wasn't one to waste words. If he spoke, then it was because something was worth saying – and listening to. Nelson crouched down beside Jor, enhancing the area of illumination for her to work on the communicator. Sahreen joined them on the ground, removed his broken headtorch, and pulled a palm beacon out of his rucksack as a substitute.

"What about the others? Do you think …?" Nelson's eyes wandered, first to Sahreen, then to Jor, desperately seeking reassurance, knowing that they had no certainty to give at that point. Sahreen's mouth formed a hard line. Jor gave an apologetic shrug and continued to fiddle with the communicator, which was emitting an ominous static. To make matters worse, it was the only one they had between the three of them. Poor Seska had been ever so embarrassed when she'd distributed the away team's gear and not had adequate provisions for each member of the team. Apparently, there'd been a misunderstanding with a coded message she'd sent to one of her contacts, a trader of surplus military supplies.

"It's busted," Jor said a few moments later, flicking the communicator off and settling it on her lap with resignation. "This Bolian tech just doesn't stand up to any punishment at all. It only fell from waist height. Some of the circuitry must have gotten knocked out of alignment."

Sahreen took the communicator from her and proceeded to examine it. He sighed. "Strange that they don't make the things user serviceable. If they hadn't moulded the casing shut, we could at least unscrew the back to inspect the components."

Only the previous day in the _Val Jean_'s engine room, Nelson had overheard B'Elanna Torres speaking colourfully to Captain Chakotay about the pros and cons of Bolian technology. In the engineer's staunch opinion, there weren't many pros. At least Chakotay's cell had managed to acquire a stash of Starfleet ration packs – Meal(s) Ready to Eat – when a Federation supply ship had been intercepted on its way to Starbase 211. If the Maquis had to resort to Bolian field rations for subsistence, then the resistance movement would surely be finished off without the Cardassians having to fire another shot.

"We should continue our way back to Torres and the others," said Jor, struggling to her feet.

Nelson didn't miss the flash of discomfort that crossed her features as she rose, nor the assessing hand she ran across her middle and around to her lower back under her rucksack. "Are you hurt?" he asked her.

She offered him a weak smile without meeting his gaze. "I just landed awkwardly is all. I'll be fine."

The way she swayed as she took her first step forwards suggested otherwise. Sahreen reached out a hand to steady her. "Will you be able to walk?" he asked.

She shrugged. "I'll have to be."

"There's analgesic in the medkit," Sahreen said. "I can –"

"No," Jor interrupted, laying a hand atop of Sahreen's on her forearm. "We shouldn't break into the medical supplies until we know that the others are OK. They might have greater need of them."

"At least let me carry your stuff," Nelson offered, stretching out a ready hand.

Jor paused, and he thought she was going to be stubborn and refuse until she nodded. "Thanks."

Nelson gently pried the pack off her shoulders surprised by the weight of it, which was far greater than his own. He knew Jor was responsible for one half of the team's demolitions kit: the explosives, detonators, and associated tools. The other half was with Tabor. In contrast, Nelson's own gear was light, affording him optimal freedom of movement should they encounter any Cardassian infantry. That possibility was seeming less and less likely now. He slung Jor's bag onto his back to join his own, and, with Sahreen leading the way again, they moved on.

..._ _ _...

There was dust everywhere. B'Elanna was convinced that, if she peeled off her clothing, her entire body underneath it would be coated in a dirty grey. Were her ears clogged full of the stuff too? Or had her eardrums perforated? The last time she'd felt this disorientated had been when Chell had accidentally let off a stun grenade in the ship's cargo bay. Before that, she'd been caught in an explosion on an away mission when a detonator had malfunctioned; an operation to destroy one of the Maquis's own bunkers before the advancing Cardassians could utilize it had gone horribly wrong. Her present situation didn't feel exactly like either of those past experiences. This had been a natural phenomenon, she was sure of it. A cave in, and likely a big one, had occurred up the main tunnel between their present location and the surface. They'd have to get eyes on it to confirm though given the tricorder situation. Perhaps the Maquis team's presence had triggered a collapse from the roof of the tunnel. It seemed too coincidental to their arrival to be regular seismic activity, though not impossible. Those unstable mineral deposits had to be involved somehow. If only she'd figured out earlier that there was uridium down here. That bit of info put a whole new spin on the situation.

She turned her thoughts to the men. There was a chorus of coughing joining her own wheezing. An arm – or was it a leg – was draped over her knees as she herself lay sprawled on her side on the ground. Propping herself up on an elbow and peering forwards, she was relieved to find a body attached to the … leg it turned out to be. She glanced to the left and was even more thankful that her headlamp illuminated a face, even if that face happened to belong to Vance. His eyes were open towards her and a sneer was fixed on his mouth. At least when he spoke, his grating voice was muted to her ears.

"For fuck's sake, Torres," he griped. "It's one cock up after another on this trip."

She yanked her legs out from under his, while muttering a string of expletives in Klingon that denounced the man's ancestry, physical attributes and bad habits. Without a universal translator Vance would miss out on the literal translation of her words, but he'd get the general idea. She really wanted to behave in a professional manner towards him for Chakotay's sake, and she really had tried. But Vance wasn't going to extend her the same courtesy. He wasn't going to afford her any respect as a comrade, let alone a superior, the ignorant pig. Scrambling to her feet – a little too quickly as her inner ears complained – she took a step backwards, and her left heel pressed down into something soft.

A terse "ow" was followed by a croaked Bajoran curse.

"Sorry," she said, spinning around – again a little too quickly – to find Tabor sitting up, rubbing his stomach.

"If it means you're OK, I'll happily take ten kicks in the guts," he said, raising a hand for her to help him up. Once standing, he lifted his hands to his ears, tilted his head from side to side and groaned at whatever sensation that induced. "That wasn't an explosion," he said assuredly, "that was a cave in."

B'Elanna nodded then had to close her eyes for a brief moment as the dimly lit passageway turned fuzzy and appeared to spin. By the time she opened them again, Dalby was on his feet a few metres away taking a long drink from his flask. B'Elanna reached into her pack to do the same until Tabor caught her elbow. "Go easy on that," he warned quietly. "If we're trapped down here …"

She nodded once again, slowly this time. Supplies. Of course. She should be the one thinking of things like that. "Dalby," she called out, "don't drink too much of that water. Our exit to the shuttle may be blocked by fallen rocks. We don't know how soon we'll be able to get out of here."

Dalby stopped drinking and tipped his head in acknowledgment. Vance, still flat out on the ground, laughed mirthlessly. B'Elanna chose to ignore him, taking a small sip of water. It mixed with the dirt in her mouth to take on a metallic taste. The heat wasn't helping with her thirst.

Tabor attempted to dust himself down looking expectantly at B'Elanna all the while. Dalby came to his side. They were waiting for instructions. Her head spun with possibilities, priorities and extrapolations. She'd prepared herself mentally before the mission by running through various outcomes in her head, had even discussed numerous scenarios with Chakotay. What would she do if there were a problem with the demolitions kit? What if one of the team were injured? What if they encountered Cardassian resistance? Getting trapped underground by a rockfall hadn't been an outcome she'd considered.

Vance's delay in joining the huddle was actually quite helpful in allowing her to collect her thoughts, but there was only so long she could overlook his absence. Tabor was trying to comm Jor but couldn't open a channel. B'Elanna caught his subtle nod to her belt and tried to raise Jor with her own communicator. Nothing. Vance shifted his position on the ground with all the urgency of an Edosian slug, and her temper flared. "Are you actually hurt?" she asked him. "Or are you just trying to piss me off even more?"

Vance laughed at that too but finally deigned to get up and join them. Dalby looked ready to spit fire at him. "Your orders?" Dalby asked B'Elanna, his fingers fidgeting with the butt of his phaser rifle.

"We have to … make contact with the others," she decided. "Once we're all together we can head toward the surface and see if there's an obstruction and how bad it is."

"We should split up," Vance argued. "You go and look for the others if you like, but I'm heading straight to the surface, right now."

B'Elanna tensed further. "No. We stick together."

Vance gestured up the tunnel as he squared up to her. "For all you know, there could be a bunch of Cardies up there blowing this place to hell."

"You didn't seem all that bothered a minute ago," B'Elanna bit back at him.

"That wind and all this dust wasn't caused by an explosion, you idiot," Dalby said to Vance. "Didn't you hear? If Torres thinks it was a rockfall, then it was a rockfall."

Dalby's confidence was flattering, but baseless as Vance soon pointed out.

"Yeah, whatever," Vance said with raised eyebrows, adding sarcastically, "Torres is _always_ right."

B'Elanna straightened, folding her arms across her chest. "Look," she said through gritted teeth, "I know I screwed up with the weapons signatures. I'm not entirely sure how yet, but … yes, I screwed up. We all know it and," she glared at Vance, "you've made your opinion on the matter perfectly clear. But Chakotay put me in command of this mission and the mission is ongoing. I make the decisions until we're back on the ship. This isn't a committee meeting; it's a briefing." She blinked, surprised at her own words and tone of authority. Maybe this was the real reason that Chakotay had included Vance on the away team: because Vance would get her so riled up that she'd be motivated into taking full ownership of the mission. Where Vance pushed at her, she'd push back two-fold. Chakotay had said Vance was there because he was both a good pilot and marksman, but from what B'Elanna had seen of the man's piloting skills, she had to disagree with the captain's assessment. Vance wouldn't have made it through the rigours of Starfleet pilot training. He was competent, but no better at flying than she was herself.

Dalby and Tabor were making noises in the affirmative, heads nodding in tandem. Vance looked as if to respond, but then his jaw clenched and, shaking his head, he backed away. They had to pass the junction to the east branch of tunnels in order to get to the surface anyway. By the time they reached the junction the situation might have changed – hopefully for the better.

Tabor checked over his equipment. He was carrying a pack full of extremely powerful explosives, but they were a top quality product sourced from a mining consortium on Betazed and thus incredibly stable until prepped for use. In any case, there'd been no damage to the canisters when he'd fallen onto them. B'Elanna tried once more to get a response from the other group via her communicator, but received only a feeble, mocking hiss. She turned it off before ordering Dalby to take point. Following on a dozen paces behind, she left Tabor the joy of bringing up the rear with Vance. The Bajoran was more tolerant of provocation than Dalby or herself. Growing up on occupied Bajor, it had been a necessity for survival. Those Bajorans who'd reacted to the insults and humiliations the Cardassians had dished out hadn't lived to repeat their mistake, and Tabor wasn't short of first-hand accounts on that subject. Not that he would just let Vance behave like an ass without passing comment. But Tabor would defend himself in a controlled and civil manner. B'Elanna quickened her stride to put more distance between herself and the rear guard. Dalby wasn't wasting any time out in front. If there was further movement inside the mountain, they'd at least reduced the likelihood of the four of them being struck down together.

As she ascended the long, winding slope in the near darkness, she settled her nerves with the thought that if Sahreen, Jor and Nelson were still where they were supposed to be, then they were fine. They would have been at an equivalent distance from the source of the incident as B'Elanna had. They'd be alive and well.

They had to be. Surely this mission couldn't go any more wrong.

..._ _ _...


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter Two**

_1130_

Nelson was disappointed. And, simultaneously, he felt guilty for being so. The feeling was unpleasant to say the least. It was a good thing that the Cardassians weren't using this planet as a base, a supply depot, or some kind of missile launch site. But he'd been looking forward to finally playing an active role in doing some damage against them: an active role in protecting the Maquis and, as a consequence, the settlers that were being persecuted and driven out of their homes by Cardassian aggression.

Perhaps Torres and the others had found something significant down the other branch of tunnels, but it seemed unlikely given what Nelson had seen - or more precisely, not seen – so far. And, even if Torres and those with her had found Cardassian weapons, Nelson wouldn't have been there at the moment of discovery. The satisfaction would not be his. He was going to have to wait for his chance to personally get some payback for what the Cardassians had done to him and thousands of others just like him.

It had been eight years already, so he _should_ be able to wait patiently for a little longer.

What were the chances of a rockfall, the very day the Maquis had ventured down into these long abandoned tunnels? What were the tunnels doing here in the first place? Sahreen had put forward that they were the remnants of an ancient mining operation, though according to historical records, this planet had never been inhabited by humanoid life. It was certainly turning out to be an interesting first away mission for Nelson, if not in the way he'd expected.

He'd anticipated that there could be danger and embraced that possibility. He'd already experienced combat once in a remote sort of way when the _Val Jean_ had come under fire from a Cardassian warship. But standing around powerless to help except to man his post, phaser in hand, ready to defend his position if the Cardassians boarded, was quite different to the current problem.

As the three of them made slow but steady progress up the shallow incline back to the rendezvous point, careful not to trip on the carpet of small stones knocked loose from the walls and ceiling, Nelson's thoughts were preoccupied with the frustration that, if their way back to the surface was blocked, they'd be late getting back to the _Val Jean_ and out of the fight in the meantime.

Jor stumbled, reaching for his elbow to halt her fall and snapping him out of his contemplations. He frowned, turning to see her eyes heavy and half closed before she slumped against him. He supported her as best he could. Beads of perspiration had moistened the dust on her forehead forming globs of dirty paste above her eyebrows. Yelling for Sahreen to come back, Nelson lowered Jor to the ground. She wasn't heavy, but with the extra gear he was now carrying in addition to his rifle, he feared she'd slip out of his hampered grasp if he didn't promptly put her down. And they needed to take a good look at her. Not that Nelson had any medical expertise he could offer, but Sahreen would know what to do.

Jor's eyes fluttered open as her head came to rest again the tunnel wall. "I'm sorry," she groaned.

Nelson froze. _Those_ words in _that_ tone of voice sent a chill through him. He shook it off. Sahreen arrived with the medkit already out of his bag. "We should scan her, shouldn't we?" Nelson said quickly, unburdening himself of his rifle so that both his hands were free to help Jor into a more comfortable position. "Maybe she has a head injury."

Sahreen nodded, calm as ever.

"I didn't hit my head," Jor insisted, more alert again. "It's the pain in my back. It's got me feeling faint."

Nelson observed closely as Sahreen calibrated the medical tricorder from the medkit to assess a human. Sahreen then held the device above Jor's head and ran it down across her torso and back up. He held the device's display so that Nelson could read the diagnosis.

"See here." Sahreen indicated the schematic of Jor's upper body on the display.

Nelson studied it carefully over Sahreen's shoulder. No wonder Jor was ailing. "A fracture to the tenth rib on the right-hand side. Blunt trauma injury to the right kidney with bleeding into the perirenal space."

Sahreen relinquished the tricorder to Nelson and reached into the medical kit. "Read me the treatment recommendation summary please."

"Ten cc's of five percent terakine for the pain," Nelson read aloud. "Vascular regeneration for the kidney damage, and osteogenic stimulation for the fracture."

Jor laughed weakly, humourlessly at that.

"What?" Nelson asked, frowning.

Sahreen explained, "There's no vascular regenerator in our medkit. What's the second-line treatment for the bleeding?"

Nelson forced himself to concentrate on the information on the screen. "Twenty milligrams of lectrazine every four hours until vascular regeneration can be initiated."

Sahreen nodded. "Obviously you need care from a qualified medic," he said, placing a hand on Jor's shoulder. "But we can make you more comfortable and keep you stable until we can get you to proper medical facilities."

"Just patch me up so I can stay on my feet," Jor said, and catching Nelson's anxious stare, she pushed herself into more of a sitting position. "Hey," she said. "I've got through worse than this. Don't look so worried."

Nelson swallowed hard and with confusion took the hypospray that Sahreen pushed into his palm.

"You should do this," Sahreen told him. "Nothing like learning on the job." When Nelson hesitated, the older man gestured to Jor's neck. "Just hold it here and depress the mechanism."

Jor let out a sigh of relief and offered Nelson a grateful smile as the analgesic he administered quickly did its work. He smiled back, feeling better for it. Like she said, she had been through worse. Next, he gave her the lectrazine making a note of the time, and hoping that in four hours they'd at the very least be back on the shuttle. It was quite possible they wouldn't be. He suppressed the urge to ask Sahreen how much lectrazine they had with them, but then Jor asked the question herself. There'd been ten doses in the medkit, Sahreen said, including the one already used. Nelson did the maths. Thirty six hours was rather more reassuring than four. And there should be an identical supply to draw upon in the group's other medkit carried by Torres, assuming that nobody else was in need of the drug, and that they could link up with her and the others. Seventy six hours, give or take. That didn't sound so bad at all.

"Osteogenic stimulator," said Sahreen, handing the device to Nelson. "Run this close to the skin above rib number ten."

Jor pointed out the relevant area above her clothing. Nelson activated the tool and held it still until it bleeped that the treatment cycle was complete. Jor inhaled slowly and deeply, and smiled again. "See? Good as new," she insisted, but her movements were stilted as she rose first onto her knees and from there onto her feet. And wobbled. Her hand slid on the slick tunnel wall as she reached out to steady herself, but she regained her balance before she could fall. "I'm fine," she snapped, brushing off the hand that Nelson offered her, then adding a quiet "sorry." He tried not to take it personally.

"Have some water," Sahreen said to her. "If you still feel faint in a moment then I'll give you a stimulant, but I'd rather not. When those wear off they leave you feeling worse than before."

Jor raised an eyebrow. "Personal experience?"

Sahreen nodded, handing her his flask. "I once stayed awake for six days straight on the damn things. When I stopped taking them I felt like my head would explode."

The older man didn't elaborate as to why he'd had reason to forgo sleep for such a long period. Nelson had soon learnt that in the type of organisation that the Maquis was, there was a fine line between knowing enough to do one's job, and having too much information about events that weren't of personal concern. The latter could be a liability. So, he tried not to ask questions about the comings and goings on the ship even though his curiosity burned. Whilst the majority of those assigned to the _Val Jean_ when Nelson had first been brought on board were still on its crew, new faces had appeared, either new recruits like himself, or transfers from other cells. And at any given time there would be empty bunks with small groups off on away missions either to meet with contacts, aid colonists, or to fight in some way.

At least most of his comrades were eager to share (in varying degrees of detail) their reasons for taking up arms. Those stories served to enrage and, as a consequence, encourage, keeping the justifications for fighting at the forefronts of everyone's minds. But, when it came to specific missions, all information was on a need to know basis. Nelson, as a raw recruit, was not usually in the loop.

A minute later, Jor straightened, insisted she really was fit to walk, and they continued.

..._ _ _...

_1145_

By the time B'Elanna and her three companions made it to the tunnel junction, the dust was settling. Even more welcome was the sound of voices and a faint glow approaching from the east. Sahreen soon strode into view followed a moment later by Nelson and, walking very stiffly, Jor. It seemed that the other three members of her team had endured the same battering as those that had remained with B'Elanna – perhaps worse.

"You're OK," Tabor exclaimed, rushing to envelope Jor in a hug, then appearing to think better of it. He settled for a hand on her shoulder, a move he then repeated with Nelson and Sahreen. Nelson was carrying Jor's pack. Sahreen had lost his headlamp. B'Elanna heaved a sigh of relief as she took in the sight of all six of her team together. Alive.

B'Elanna recounted Tabor's discovery of uridium ore in the surrounding rocks to the three who'd been elsewhere at the time. Sahreen reported a lack of any significant discoveries to the east and on the status of the group's casualty. Jor's injury was a real concern, just how great of one would depend on the seriousness of the suspected rockfall. The sooner they inspected it the better.

On the way down, it had taken ten minutes to hike from the tunnel entrance to the junction in which the group was currently assembled. The ascent, though the gradient was shallow, could be expected to take a little longer than that, and there was no way yet to tell how far along they could travel before their route was blocked. B'Elanna took a deep breath in a vain attempt to calm herself. Part of her wanted to sprint on, but her better judgement was to take a steady pace. The heat seemed to have cranked up a notch in the last half hour and she was desperately thirsty now. The others must be suffering even more. Vance and Dalby had removed their leather vests. Even in the gloom she could see that Nelson was red-faced and sweating. With sadistic pleasure she instructed the kid to share some of his load with Vance. The pilot, to her surprise, took half of the heavy explosives without complaint. There was a first time for everything.

Six pairs of eyes were upon her, their expectant stares weighing her down while at the same time lightening her feet to push on forwards. Each of the six had been chosen for a particular ability, technical or military, and Chakotay had chosen her – the Academy drop-out, not exactly known for her excellent people skills – to lead them.

Sahreen had been in the Maquis since the movement's inception and was the oldest member of the team. She felt particularly awkward to be in charge of the mission over him, but, according to Seska, Chakotay didn't consider Sahreen leadership material. Sahreen was too quiet and reserved to give orders. Not that he wasn't well respected for his strong work ethic, unflappable demeanour and the fact that, without ever being weak-willed or timid, he never complained. Dalby and Vance had been recruited around the same time as B'Elanna. Those two were similar in many ways – to each other and to herself. Both men were quick to anger, but Vance enjoyed complaining about anything and everything, whereas Dalby did whatever was needed without a fuss. The other three Maquis were nearer to B'Elanna in age. Tabor, the Bajoran, was the closest she would consider to a friend. He and Jor had history; both had lived for a short time on the Salva IV colony before Cardassian aggression had forced them into the waiting arms of the Maquis. That left Nelson, the orphan who'd dropped out of high school to join the cause. This was the first time Chakotay had let him take part in a mission off the ship, and the kid had had the misfortune to be assigned to her command.

B'Elanna could only hope that, between the seven of them, they'd have the expertise to extricate themselves from this mess she'd gotten them into. She ordered them to move out, and this time she led the way herself.

..._ _ _...

_1210_

Hopes had risen. According to their tricorders, and perhaps more accurately, Sahreen's excellent memory and sense of direction, they were a mere fifty metres from the surface, and their route had so far been clear aside from a mass of tiny stones that cluttered the ground underfoot. The air had grown more hazy as they ascended, however, making breathing more unpleasant. Nelson, third in the line, rounded a bend and caught sight of two static dots of light ahead: Torres and Dalby. As he neared their position - right where the tunnel was supposed to meet the open air - Nelson could see why they'd stopped. He gasped. Even Sahreen, when he soon joined the first three, let out a less than polite exclamation. It shouldn't have been such a shock, but it had to be natural human instinct to react that way when confronted with the concrete reality of being buried alive. A huge jumble of rocks, ranging in size from tiny slivers to person-sized boulders, lay in their path, plugging the tunnel entrance.

"This isn't a roof collapse," Sahreen said, picking at the debris. "These rocks have fallen down the mountainside and poured into the mouth of the tunnel like a river." He grabbed a handful of the looser, finer matter and sieved it through his fingers. "Top soil."

Torres began to pace in a tight circuit, one hand on her hip, her tricorder in the other. "The debris field extends for five metres," she said.

"That doesn't sound so bad," remarked Dalby.

"But the pile's up to three metres high. This piece of crap tricorder can't calculate the mass, but … it's a lot of rock."

Jor and Tabor arrived, with Vance right behind them. The latter clasped his hands on top of his closely shaven scalp in dismay. Torres stopped her pacing. The additional sources of light made it easier to see the obstruction, though in no way helped in the perception of its depth. Nelson had never considered himself to be claustrophobic. He'd been quite comfortable exploring the subterranean passageways as they searched for weapons, even in the sections where the headroom had reduced to less than his one hundred and eighty centimetres – and those sections were abundant. But the tunnel that he'd until now considered comfortably wide seemed to close in. With the seven of them assembled together in a huddle, that cramped feeling was all the more exacerbated.

Tabor spoke, his eyes flicking to Jor though his head didn't move. "When we don't make our rendezvous, surely Chakotay will send someone out to look for us."

"No," Torres said. "He won't. It was agreed that if we're more than two hours overdue, he'll not risk sending anyone else. After what happened on Quatal we can't afford to lose any more people. We all knew that coming here."

Quatal, Olmerak, Volan – half a dozen good people had been killed in recent weeks, and a couple more maimed and out of the fight. There were plenty of volunteers willing to step into their places, but it took time to initiate them into the organisation's ways, and that could only be done once their backgrounds and motivations had been thoroughly checked out to ensure they weren't spies for the Federation or, even worse, the Cardassians.

"I know that," Tabor replied raising his hands in deference to the half-Klingon. "I just think … when it comes down to it, Chakotay won't want to just leave us behind."

"He won't want to, no," said Dalby. "But if that's the protocol …"

Torres nodded. "We're on our own. None of us should waste time hoping to be rescued."

"Starfleet may be a bunch of wankers," Vance said bitterly, "but they wouldn't leave their people behind."

"This isn't the time to discuss Chakotay's tactical decisions," Torres snapped. "The fact is he made a tough call. And we're not conscripts, we're volunteers. So, if you didn't like it, you shouldn't have come."

Vance opened his mouth, but held his tongue. Nelson couldn't fathom Chakotay's rationale in placing Vance under Torres's command. The pilot and the engineer had been at each other's throats for as long as Nelson had known them, and with the rest of the team either backing Torres or staying silent whenever an argument broke out between the two, Vance was an isolated figure, distinct from the cohesive unit that was the rest of the team. It didn't seem to bother him, though. Perhaps he actually enjoyed being a clod for the attention it got him. Some people were just like that. Nelson had shared classes with a few back in school. Which seemed a lifetime away now.

Six solemn faces turned again to fix on the obstruction. If their stares could vaporise solid rock, the exit would have been cleared in an instant. Instead of focusing on the rockfall, Nelson kept his eyes on his comrades. If he was going to be of help to them, he had to remain calm, and looking at that giant mass of debris was making his heart race.

"So, how the hell are we going to get out of here?" piped up Vance eventually, staring with unmitigated contempt towards Torres.

Torres looked down at her tricorder once more, snapped it off, and, head held high, said, "We dig our way out."

..._ _ _...

B'Elanna glanced around, taking in the reactions of the others to her suggestion. No. It wasn't a suggestion, it was an order. Not that there was the slightest thing she could do if they all disagreed with her plan.

Dalby sighed, running a dusty hand through his equally dusty hair, but he'd do what she asked. Tabor, always quick to show support, was already setting down his pack and removing his vest ready to work. Sahreen's expression was bland as ever, but he straightened from his position leaning back against the wall behind Nelson. Nelson's attention was on Jor. Jor wasn't going to able to contribute to the heavy lifting and she'd be pissed about it. B'Elanna would have to find another way for her to contribute.

Predictably, Vance was the first to speak, deep frown lines creasing his shiny forehead. "What the hell are we supposed to dig with? You got a shovel stowed in that pack, Torres? Or a portable replicator to make one?"

B'Elanna scowled at him. "We use our hands. I know it'll be hard going. For every piece of rock we move another will take its place from above, but we don't necessarily have to shift the entire pile. If we can burrow through … we just need a hole large enough to crawl out of." It was hardly a foolproof plan. Without any heavy equipment, it was an overwhelming prospect, but what choice did they have? There was no other exit. The ventilation shafts were too narrow to climb up even if they'd brought climbing equipment.

"Sod that," countered Vance. "I say we risk using the explosives and try to vaporise some of the bigger rocks. Or we use our phasers to cut ourselves a hole."

"You fire a phaser in here and the whole roof could come down on top of us!" B'Elanna shouted. "Uridium ore, remember?"

"I say it's worth the risk. Digging could take weeks. We'll die of thirst long before then." Vance's hand moved to the phaser on his hip. Surely he wasn't that stupid, was he? Dalby lunged for him, pinning him by the throat against the wall.

"You even mention it … even think about it again," Dalby growled, "and I'll kill you myself with my bare hands."

As much as B'Elanna enjoyed seeing Vance taken to task, it wouldn't do to let Dalby get too carried away. With one member of the team already injured, she needed the rest of them fit to dig. Dalby breaking his fingers on Vance's thick head would not be helpful. And she did have a responsibility to maintain order. She had to exert her authority without losing her cool. "That's enough," she said firmly. Dalby looked at her then back to Vance before releasing him with a little pat to the cheek for good measure.

Vance took his hand off his phaser with an exaggerated flourish. "So what about water?" he asked, civilly. "And food and air while we're at it? If we start digging away in this heat without drinking, we'll cook in our skins."

"I'm aware of that," B'Elanna said through clenched teeth. "We'll pool our supplies of food and water and see just how much we have between us."

Vance scoffed. "I'll tell you how much we have. Bugger all." He pushed down the straps of his pack and turning, unzipped a pocket to pull out a packet of ration bars, a few pieces of some fruit that B'Elanna couldn't identify, and a transparent, litre-sized drinking bottle that was barely a quarter full. "There's my contribution," Vance said, dumping the lot at B'Elanna's feet.

B'Elanna knew she had little more herself. Just one MRE (chicken with noodles according to the label), a single ration bar, and perhaps half a litre of water. She added it to the pile. The others did the same. The water situation was dire. The food might have sustained them if they were to be sedentary, but with the amount of calories they were going to burn off with their exertions as well as in their bodies' attempts to thermoregulate, they'd each be thinner leaving this place than they had been coming in. And none of them were carrying much in the way of excess fat; Vance was a big guy, but it was all muscle.

She deflected for a moment, addressing one of the other points Vance had raised. "There's nothing we can do about the air supply," she said. "Either there's adequate ventilation to keep us supplied with oxygen and prevent CO2 poisoning or there isn't. I know that's not very reassuring, but at least we haven't detected any noxious gases down here." Pausing to study the faces of her team members again, she held Sahreen's gaze when their eyes met. He'd be reluctant to contribute ideas if he thought it would make her look weak or incompetent, but she really did need his input now. Making a general call for suggestions would only invite Vance to say something insulting and unhelpful again. Vance really was impossible.

Luckily, Sahreen took the hint. "We found condensation at the far reaches of the east tunnel," he said. "Enough that it trickles down the walls in places. If we could collect sufficient quantity, it might sustain us."

Finally, something positive. "Good. See if you can work out a way to funnel it into our containers, then you go back down there and see what you can collect." It would mean one less body for the digging effort in the meantime, but Jor didn't look strong enough to hike back down there on her own, and she didn't know Nelson's capabilities well enough yet to send him off to work unsupervised.

"We don't need to eat yet," she said, stalling again. She directed Jor to take charge of the supplies, to portion out the food into seven approximately equal measures. Nelson helped Jor move the heavy gear back down the tunnel a few dozen metres to leave a clear space for the rest to work in. The other woman was also tasked with rigging a couple of palm beacons together to boost the illumination at the 'face' as Dalby had taken to calling the front of the obstruction. Now they needed a system. It would be dangerous – there was no getting around that. Moving one boulder could bring a rush of smaller rocks flowing in. B'Elanna would lead from the front and the others could form a line behind her to convey the debris back down the tunnel without completely blocking the way. They couldn't cut themselves off from the air supply deeper in the mine. Ordering Dalby to work beside her – clearly some of the rocks would be too heavy for a single person to move – and with nothing for it but to make their best effort, they started to dig.

..._ _ _...


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter Three**

_1430_

Forming one fifth of a living conveyor belt was a monotonous task. Not that Nelson hadn't got used to monotony in the last few months. When he'd made the decision to leave his comfortable life on Earth and seek out the Maquis, he'd envisioned a lot more excitement than reality had provided.

Monotony gave him too much time to think. For the last eight years, his days had been filled with enough activity and distraction that he didn't have to think about the events that had sent him to Earth in the first place. Only in the last couple of years had he been reminded – allowed himself to be reminded at all – of the first ten years of his life. It had served him better to section off those memories, to take the new life he'd been offered and throw himself into it with zeal rather than dwell on why he lived and others didn't. And the life he'd found himself embracing on Earth was so different from the one he'd lived on Setlik III, that it hadn't been difficult to escape reminders of the frontier.

His foster parents – an emotionally distant, but not unkind couple – had enrolled him in the best schools that their high social status could access. The education that Nelson had enjoyed had been intense, with long days of lessons and extracurricular activities. In a couple of years, he'd managed to catch up academically with his peers. He'd signed up for every sports team, games club and field trip that he could. In the short school holidays, his foster parents had taken him to visit Earth's famous landmarks and disparate cultures. They'd even taken him to their places of work so that he could observe and learn there.

But he couldn't distract himself forever. When the news reports had started coming in about the shocking Cardassian activities along what was now the DMZ – and his foster parents had always insisted he keep up with current affairs – memories of his earlier life had begun to intrude. He wasn't the child of an eminent Federation diplomat and a professor of classics at Oxford. He was the son of two farmers, second generation settlers of the colony on Setlik III. On Setlik III, his pastimes had included fishing and shooting the native predators that worried the farming community's livestock – useful life skills. On Earth, he spent hours each week playing chess and parrises squares, learning ancient Greek, and participating in holoprograms. His real parents would have shaken their heads in horror.

They'd been murdered in front of him: his father shot in the head at point-blank range and killed instantly; his mother screaming at Nelson to run and hide as the Cardassian disruptor beam cut into her chest. He'd crawled under a soil cultivator, tears streaming down his face as he sobbed silently, waiting for the angry grey-skinned aliens with the spoon-shaped indents on their foreheads to either find and kill him, or to forget him and leave. Eventually, the sounds of disruptor fire and screaming had ceased and the whine of a transporter beam had pierced the wailing of the wind. Cautiously, he'd crawled out from his hiding place and then, gaining in confidence that the aliens really had left, he'd run back to the place where his parents had fallen. His father lay face down in the dirt, a gaping wound in his skull. His mother had collapsed against the low wall of the sheep pen. The disrupter burns still smoked, her eyes were closed and she lay still. But when Nelson shook her by the shoulders, crying out for her to wake, her eyes did open. She reached for his face, groaned an apology then stilled again. He slumped down beside her, lost in place and time, until sometime later, a curly-haired Starfleet crewman had picked him up and carried his limp body to an awaiting shuttle.

A week later, on his tenth birthday, Nelson had left Setlik III on a huge Starfleet vessel bound for Earth along with a diverse group of other stunned survivors. The journey was rather a blur. There'd been a counsellor and a doctor. He'd been given medicines, and, by the time the two weeks on the ship was over, he'd been talking and eating again, even excited at the prospect of seeing the planet where humanity had evolved, where a single city's population could number in the millions, and where he'd have every opportunity afforded him that he could possibly imagine.

"Brace yourself. This one's heavy," Torres grunted, straining under the weight of a head-sized rock.

Nelson held out his hands, took the rock and staggered down to Tabor onto whom he unloaded it before returning to his original position. Torres was ready with another small boulder. The previous rhythm resumed.

Just short of eight years on from his arrival on Earth – on his eighteenth birthday, in fact – he'd beamed up from a London transport hub to Earth Spacedock and boarded an Andorian transport bound for Betazed. From Betazed, he'd found passage to Iadara on a Tellarite freighter, the Captain waiving his usual passenger fee in return for Nelson's help scrubbing deck plates – the first of a series of menial jobs. Many of the adult colonists who'd lived on Setlik III before the massacre had since emigrated to Iadara, and Nelson had decided that Iadara would be a good place to start his search for those organising armed resistance to the Cardassian aggression. He'd left a message for his foster family, time coded so that they'd be unable to read it until he was three days clear of Earth space.

He'd kept his destination and intentions vague. Not that his guardians had any power to keep him on Earth now that he was an adult, but they'd try to get him to come back by sending messages, perhaps even one of their assistants in person to coerce him to return. The future they had mapped out for him involved higher education at one of the prestigious Earth universities – Oxford, Harvard, or even Starfleet Academy – followed by a glittering career in diplomacy or academia. How good it would make his foster parents look to have taken a barely literate orphan of Setlik III and turned him into such a high achiever. His status as a survivor of the massacre always worked in his favour when it came to being offered such opportunities, but even without the sympathy vote, he could have gained admittance to any educational establishment he'd wished on his own merits, to study whatever subject he chose.

The thing was, he didn't care for that sort of future. He wasn't even concerned with finishing high school. Not whilst the Cardassians and the Federation were still playing games with the lives of the colonists along the border. Setlik III hadn't been the last colony to suffer the fate that it had. When the newsfeeds had started mentioning pockets of resistance forming out on the border attacking Cardassian ships and hijacking their supplies, Nelson had made the decision: as soon as he was able, he would head back to the frontier where he'd spent the first ten years of his life. He would find those people who were offering resistance to the Cardassians and he would join them. It wasn't a spur of the moment decision. He'd spent months considering the wisdom of such a move, concluding that yes, it was dangerous, but that his conscience couldn't allow him not to go.

Much to his dismay, his provincial accent and dialect had been replaced – so gradually that it had escaped his notice for a long time – by the well-spoken phrasing and manners of those he associated with on Earth. He'd only become aware of the change in his way of speaking when a friend of his foster father had praised him for his progress in 'speaking like a member of civilized society'.

That Earth accent was immediately noticeable to the officials and traders when he disembarked at the small spaceport on Iadara. Several made comments, curious as to why he was so far from 'home'. Pawning the antique watch and cufflinks he'd received on the morning of his birthday got him enough latinum to keep him in food and board for several weeks. At least the Ferengi pawnbroker had promised him that it would. Finding work on Iadara could be difficult; after eight years on Earth, his manual labour skills were rusty to say the least and there was little call for highly educated but inexperienced teenagers out on the frontier. However, farming was in his blood and he had no doubt he could soon relearn all he had forgotten if someone were willing to give him a chance. He was still a crack shot with a rifle too, having maintained the skills he'd learnt as a boy on Setlik by joining the school velocity team.

His looks were in his favour. He was tall and having let his beard grow out during the journey from Earth, he looked a good bit older than his eighteen years. Unfortunately, he knew that once he opened his mouth his adolescent awkwardness showed, but he could hang out in the bars around the main commercial centre without being asked to leave on account of his youth. Whilst he'd wanted to be noticed, getting noticed by the right people was a problem, and not something he had thought through properly until he was holed up in his sparsely-furnished berth on the Andorian transport for two weeks. One couldn't just get to the frontier and start mouthing off about wanting to join the group that would soon be known as the Maquis. Along the Federation side of what would become the DMZ, there were plenty of Starfleet forces ready to arrest anyone they suspected of planning or carrying out acts of 'terrorism'.

In the end, it was his 'badge of honour' as a survivor of the Setlik III massacre that got him in touch with the right people. During his second week on Iadara, as his confidence in his plan began to waver, he'd dropped his origins into a conversation with his Bolian landlady. Less than twenty four hours later, the Bolian had introduced him to a sun-beaten rancher named Meyer. Meyer, it transpired, had also lived on Setlik III until the massacre. Nelson didn't recognise him, but that wasn't surprising given the number of colonists and the years that had passed since.

Meyer offered him work: the most menial of tasks for very little money, but with food and lodgings supplied. Meyer spent a lot of time off-world and relied on hired help to protect his assets when he wasn't there. It was hardly the fast track into the Maquis that Nelson had hoped for, but he felt sure that in time he would find them, or they would find him. Meyer might well be the key. The man was extremely vocal in his dislike for the Federation's appeasement of the Cardassian Union.

After a couple of months, which turned out to be a protracted 'interview' process – a thorough sounding out by Meyer as to why Nelson would leave such luxury on Earth behind – Nelson had been introduced to Chakotay. A week after that he was shown around the engine room of the _Val Jean_ by a hot-tempered, half-Klingon engineer who was so insistent that he not touch anything that he'd jammed his hands into his pockets and landed flat on his face when he tripped over a loose deck plate. Torres had scolded him for his clumsiness and yelled at the culprit responsible for the offending deck plate, a colourfully-dressed woman named Henley. After a few days spent diligently cleaning out plasma conduits and counting stem bolts for Torres, Nelson had decided that she really wasn't that bad as long as one didn't cross her. After his initiation to the ship's workings, he'd received a thorough grounding in the use of knives and grenades by Meyer himself. Nelson's sharp eye with a phaser hadn't escaped Meyer's attention on the ranch. It was that skill, more than his idealistic enthusiasm, which had made him an attractive recruit for the Maquis. He'd lived on the ship ever since. It had started to seem like a prison until Torres had approached him in the galley with the very welcome news that he was needed for an away mission. Needed.

"Nelson, I need you focused," Torres said, her breath a little ragged.

He blinked as the engineer peered up at him. "If you slow down, we all have to slow down," she explained, her tone firm, but not unsympathetic.

"Sorry," he said, his awareness returning in full to the present. "My mind wandered."

She nodded, understanding. "It's this heat. It's affecting all of us." And stepping away from him on her way back to her position at the face, she called over her shoulder, "Just keep going for another twenty minutes or until Sahreen gets back with the water, if that's sooner. Then we'll take a short break. You're doing great."

Praise from Torres was like the gold-pressed latinum of all compliments. With a warmth in his chest not solely due to the lungful of hot, dusty air he slowly inhaled, he resumed his assigned task.

Focused.

..._ _ _...

_1500_

They'd been working for three hours, and it seemed as if they had hardly made a dent in the pile. Certainly, they didn't seem to have advanced in position at all. The temperature had rocketed. They'd all by now removed their jackets and top layers of clothing and were sweating profusely. Jor had insisted on contributing to the digging effort having self-administered another dose of the two drugs previously given to her. She'd taken position at the back of the line so as not to hold the rest up by her slowness. Nelson could barely see that far down the tunnel, but Tabor had told him in passing. Conversation was sparse, each saving their breath for the more important effort of digging and conveying, but from time to time they exchanged a few words.

Between the six of them they'd finished the last of the water they'd brought with them, and anxiously awaited Sahreen's return. The small amount of water Nelson had taken on board had done little to quench his thirst.

When Sahreen arrived back with four full containers of murky water, he was congratulated with a ripple of applause. "It wouldn't pass any potability standards," he said ruefully. "But we can deal with the consequences of heavy metal poisoning when we get out."

"Better to risk heavy metal poisoning than the certainty of dehydration," Torres agreed, taking a sip from one of the bottles and clearly trying to keep a neutral expression. "I've tasted worse," she said, passing the bottle on to Tabor.

"Really?" Tabor said with a wry smile. "Like what, exactly?"

Torres smiled back, a rare sight at the best of times. "That Bajoran ale you insist on drinking on those few occasions when we make it to a bar."

"Bajoran ale is no bloodwine, I'll give you that," Tabor conceded before sampling the water. His face contorted. "Urgh, you can hardly compare my ale to this."

"Piss would taste better than that," Vance decided after spluttering through several gulps. The possibility of having to resort to drinking urine had already been discussed and discounted as an option. Torres had remembered from her Starfleet survival training that drinking urine was inadvisable even if no other fluid was available as it would only worsen dehydration.

Torres glared at him, her momentary lightness of mood soured. "Fine. You drink urine and leave more water for us."

Nelson was tempted to agree with Vance for once, but he wouldn't dare say so in Torres's presence. The murky brew was quite possibly the worst thing he'd ever tasted and in his travels around Earth he had sampled a lot of bad cuisine. Whenever he thought back to the jellied eels or laverbread his stomach turned.

After explaining to Torres how he'd cobbled together various bits of kit to make a collection apparatus, Sahreen was sent back with the empty containers to fetch more of the water. He was confident that with practise he could reduce the time it took him to collect each batch. With their new source of water came the inevitable issue of its excretion. Until now, their dehydrated bodies had been losing so much water in perspiration that the lack of toilet facilities hadn't been a problem. Torres decreed that they would designate an area five minutes' walk down the tunnel to use as a latrine. There was a recess a metre or so deep in the tunnel wall that Sahreen suggested might have once been a refuge point: a place for a miner to wait in safety as an ore-filled tram passed by. Not that any rails or evidence thereof remained on the ground. The concern was that eventually the smell would drift up to the area they were working in. They couldn't flush any waste away, and they had nothing with them to mask the odour. Going any deeper – past the junction and down the west branch, for example – would be an inefficient use of time. Whenever one of them left to pay a visit, the conveyor slowed. It meant that Sahreen would have to walk past the latrine area on his way to and from 'the well', unfortunate both for him and anyone he happened to disturb. But they didn't have the luxury of fussing over privacy.

With that thought in mind, Nelson pulled off his T-shirt. This was no place for airs and graces. His damp clothing clung to his body uncomfortably and the last thing he wanted was to develop a rash. Laying it out flat on a high ledge, he held little hope that it would dry in the sticky air. He did at least have a dry jacket, having stowed that in his rucksack earlier. Inside his boots his feet were clammy and sore, but he worried that if he took them off he'd not be able to get them back on again. And there was no telling how much longer he'd have to endure the heat. He made a note to ask Sahreen's advice on the boots later, what with Torres's mood having turned black again. Even in the short time he'd known her, Nelson had learnt that bothering her in that state with inessential questions would only make her more irritable.

He was keenly aware that he didn't exactly smell very fresh. It wasn't as if he was the only one, but it was still embarrassing, especially with Jor present. Trying not to think along those lines, he consoled himself with the fact that, soon enough, they'd all stop noticing such odours. Actually, it was a wonder they could smell anything at all given the amount of dust that clogged their noses.

With Torres calling them back into line, Nelson put some distance between himself and Jor in any case. He rolled his shoulders, wiped his moist brow with his forearm, and geared up for another round of a really crappy version of pass the parcel.

This was how it was going to be: a perpetual cycle of work, drink, work, and hopefully, somewhere in between, eat. This, over and over again until they escaped.

Or they couldn't do it anymore.

..._ _ _...

_1800_

B'Elanna's fingers were bleeding. Covered in small scratches and larger grazes from the razor sharp edges that some of the rubble exhibited, the blood mingled with the dirt making it difficult to tell what was a fresh scab and what was congealed dust. She'd wrapped strips of cloth around her hands to protect her palms, and the others had done likewise. But she wanted her thumbs and fingers free for maximum dexterity. There was something disconcerting about having her fingers bound together, the lack of freedom of it. She'd never liked wearing mittens as a child. So what if they had a greater thermal efficiency than gloves with separate fingers. They were restrictive.

If it weren't for the uridium problem, she'd run the dermal regenerator in the medkit over the abrasions. But they had to keep the use of electrical equipment to a minimum. The lights were essential, everything else was not.

Her back and shoulders ached and her head pounded. She wouldn't stop though. There was nothing for it but to keep working. There was no rescue coming for them. Either they made their own escape, or they would eventually succumb to starvation or one of the many consequences that came along with the environment they were trapped in.

She wondered just what civilization had existed on this planet and how long ago it had excavated the tunnels. The extremes of weather between summer and winter made it all but inhospitable for any of the major Alpha Quadrant races to settle here permanently, hence the planet's suitability as a potential staging post for the Cardassian military. The Maquis had arrived in what passed for local spring, deeming environmental suits unnecessary. The cooling units that those were equipped with would have come in handy now, and, as much as the thought of donning a Starfleet uniform again disgusted her, those were at least made of practical, breathable fabric.

"How are we going to ration the food?" Tabor whispered, as he helped her pry a particularly dense block of stone out of the blockage. Dalby had switched places with the Bajoran in an attempt to break the monotony. B'Elanna hoped she wasn't going to find Vance's corpse next time she headed aft. She was depending on Jor to keep the peace back there. So far, no raised voices had carried forward, so the two men must have come to a temporary truce. Or maybe they only clashed when B'Elanna was involved. More often than not it was in coming to her defence that Dalby took umbrage with Vance. She thought about asking Tabor for his opinion on that, but quickly discounted the idea.

Food rationing. What the hell was she supposed to say? How could she decide on rations when she had no idea how much longer it would take to clear the debris? Their food supplies amounted to not much more than one solid meal and a snack each, and that was for a typical day's activity, not to replenish the huge amount of calories they were burning off with their exertions. She wasn't even sure about the mineral content of the foods and whether eating would make the dehydration worse. Sahreen's water collections barely kept up with demand. Jor had already divided the food into seven portions. B'Elanna could order the food handed out with instructions for each person to decide for themselves how they wanted to make it last. Or she could make that choice for them. She shrugged, turning to check on the location of the others then back to the Bajoran. "In the end, what difference does it make?" she said, trying not to raise her voice. "The food contains a finite amount of energy. Whether we eat it all today, or eke it out over a few days, we'll start burning glycogen and then fat sooner or later."

Tabor nodded. They lifted the block, staggered along with it until they met Nelson and Dalby and could hand it off to them. Returning to the face, B'Elanna picked out a cluster of larger blocks to tackle next before planning to start on a new technique: filling their empty backpacks – the only suitable containers – with smaller pieces of rubble to ferry back. A simple bucket would have been useful. B'Elanna made a note to insist it be made standard gear for future away missions. Buckets, durable communicators, and high-spec tricorders. A shovel wouldn't go amiss either.

Beside her, Tabor glanced discreetly over his shoulder then turned back to her. "Look, I don't know if this is helpful, but … when I was a child and food was short, we found it better to make what we had last out, even if it meant just a couple of spoonfuls of edible moss once a day, rather than eat a full meal and have nothing for the next three days. Those bits of food were something to look forward to. They didn't keep us from being hungry, but they did help to raise our spirits up."

B'Elanna swallowed hard, unsure how to respond. "That is helpful," she said after a moment, her decision made. "Very helpful. Thanks."

..._ _ _...

"What's this?" Vance exclaimed as Jor handed him half a moba fruit and three-quarters of an unwrapped Starfleet ration bar.

"Your dinner," Jor said evenly, not lingering near the pilot, but moving along to hand Nelson the same. He took it eagerly, but refrained from tucking in until they'd all been served. One of the very few similarities he'd found between family life on Setlik and on Earth was the insistence on good table manners in both households.

In contrast, Vance didn't wait, stuffing the portion of fruit into his mouth in one go and chewing noisily. "I don't know about you lot, but I'm starving," he garbled.

"You are not _starving_," Tabor corrected him, peering at the food with interest until Jor passed him his own ration.

Vance shrugged. "No, I guess not. Not yet. I'm bloody hungry though."

Tabor hunkered down next to Nelson with his meal, and Jor soon joined them, crouching gingerly then settling onto her backside.

"I don't know when I last had moba fruit," Tabor said. "It must have been before I left Bajor for Valo II."

"How long ago was that?" Nelson asked. He wouldn't have pried, but Tabor had brought the subject up so Nelson figured he was happy to discuss it.

"A couple of years before the end of the Occupation. My mother bribed a Lurian merchant to smuggle my sister and I off-world." Tabor shook his head thoughtfully before continuing to reminisce. "I can't remember the guy's name, but once we were safe from Cardassian patrols, he let us sit on the bridge of his ship and look at the star streaks. He didn't stop talking the whole time. By the end of the journey we were hoping his universal translator would stop working. I shouldn't be unkind though. He probably saved our lives." Tabor tasted the fruit and smiled slightly. "Just like I remember it."

Jor wasn't eating with the same enthusiasm as the others.

"Aren't you hungry?" Tabor asked her.

Swallowing a piece of ration bar with obvious effort, she explained, "To be honest, I feel a little queasy. I'm worried if I eat I'll throw up, and I don't want to waste it."

Tabor frowned. "But you should try. To keep up your strength."

"I haven't been working as hard as you. I don't feel right drawing the same ration."

Torres, who'd been sitting quietly behind the three of them, spoke up, "Your body's trying to heal itself and you're dealing with the same heat and humidity as the rest of us. Of course you should draw the same size ration. None of us think otherwise."

Nelson eyed Vance, sure that the outspoken man would have something to add on the subject. But Vance was busy picking the last crumbs of food out of his lap, and he remained tight-lipped. Jor set down her uneaten food and rubbed her palms across her face. "I'll try again later," she said, closing her eyes and resting her head on Tabor's shoulder.

Nelson turned to Tabor and saw the same knitted brow on the Bajoran's face that he felt on his own. Torres must have caught their shared look too.

"Not quite the first away mission you'd imagined, is it?" she said.

Nelson turned another ninety degrees so that he faced her. "No," he said honestly. "But I don't regret being here. Not at all." He meant that too, wholeheartedly, despite the monotony of digging, and the threat that he would die having never so much as seen a Cardassian.

"Maybe I jinxed us. Is that the right word?" said Tabor, shifting around so that he too faced the half-Klingon. Jor adjusted her position to compensate and closed her eyes again.

Torres raised an eyebrow. "It depends what you mean."

"Well … you know I've been spending a lot of time working with Seska lately?"

Torres nodded.

"I know she's your friend B'Elanna, but … you know how she is. The questions and her stories … she never stops. So, when you pulled me aside and told me I was selected for this mission, I was very glad at the thought to be getting a break from her." He winced. "I told Hogan I wouldn't mind if the away mission took a month."

"Oh thanks, mate," grumbled Vance. "That's just mint, that is."

Tabor frowned at the pilot then at Torres. "Mint?"

"Don't look at me," Torres snorted. "I don't know what he's saying half the time, either."

"I was being sarky," Vance explained, which only added to the Bajoran's confusion.

"Are you sure you're speaking the same language as the rest of us?" asked Tabor. "I know my English isn't perfect, but …"

Nelson chuckled. To his knowledge, most of the human colony worlds spoke what had once been known as American English, with accents varying from planet to planet. But there were exceptions. If Vance had been from Earth, Nelson would have had trouble placing his region of origin from the way he spoke. At times, the pilot sounded Antipodean, but then he would use other words in a way typical of the current vernacular of south-eastern England. With that mix, it was no wonder that Tabor, who'd learnt his English from human aid workers on Valo II, found Vance difficult to understand. It was fortunate that the Bajoran had bothered to learn the human language. Many of the Bajorans in the Maquis relied upon the universal translator. It made things difficult when a UT was unavailable or impractical. Few of the humans spoke any dialect of Bajoran, Sahreen being one notable exception. In fact, some spoke only broken English themselves their mother tongues being other Earth languages. The UT had made people lazy.

Vance locked stares with Tabor for a long moment, before rolling his eyes and sighing. "My version's the original and best."

Tabor shrugged, jolting Jor's head and leading to a jocular apology. Discomfited somewhat by their obvious affection, Nelson turned his attention back to his food, which he was savouring, chewing slowly to make it last the entire five minute break that Torres had allocated.

"My first away mission," Torres said, "the _Val Jean _answered a distress call from Portas IX. We had to evacuate thirty three casualties. The Cardassians had set off a dirty bomb and poisoned the entire subcontinent."

Nelson's hand paused midway between his lap and his mouth, moba juice dripping down his wrist as he looked to Torres. "A dirty bomb? As in radioactive waste?"

"Barbaric, isn't it? The Maquis don't have the resources to decontaminate an area of that size. Nor do the settlers. The Cardassians know that. Once the remaining human colonists have left, they'll either swoop in and claim the colony by decontaminating and establishing a garrison, or they might even leave it uninhabitable and abandoned. They don't even want half of the contested worlds in the DMZ. They just don't want anyone else to live there either."

Abandoned. Like Setlik III. When, after the massacre, the human colonists had emigrated to Iadara and other planets, they'd taken every trace of human life that they could with them. According to hearsay, they'd even exhumed all the graves in Setlik's cemeteries before they left and cremated the remains, so that the graves could not be desecrated by any Cardassians that moved in. The Cardassians had a penchant for vandalizing sacred places. A Bajoran temple on Draygo III had been the first target of a gang of Cardassian thugs during a raid on that planet.

Nelson waited for Torres to finish eating her current mouthful before venturing, "Have you ever been to Setlik III?" and adding quickly, "Obviously I wouldn't ask for sensitive mission details, but … I was just wondering."

She shook her head. "No. I haven't been out that way. I don't think it has much strategic importance anymore. Not now that all the human colonists have left. The Cardassians haven't moved on in, so…"

"No reason for the Maquis to visit," Nelson finished for her.

Torres fixed her eyes on his, searchingly. "Would you want to go back there?" she asked slowly.

Nelson considered. Would he? Really? He couldn't make a firm conclusion. "I don't know. Maybe. Out of curiosity. To see if it looks anything like I remember it." He averted his eyes downwards, putting the rest of the moba fruit into his mouth to distract from the lump in his throat that had unexpectedly materialised.

Torres went back to her own meal and, discreetly, let the subject drop.

..._ _ _...


	4. Chapter 4

**Chapter Four**

_2300_

"All right, let's take another break. Ten minutes." B'Elanna sighed, resisting the urge to sink to her knees and from there curl into a foetal position on the ground. Instead, she hobbled down the line, mustering a few words of encouragement for each member of her team as they stretched tired muscles and flexed sore fingers. To her relief – and his, evidently – Vance had taken off down the tunnel, negating the need for B'Elanna to fabricate any politeness to him. When she got to Jor's position, the other woman had the medkit open, preparing to dose herself with a hypospray. The quantity of lectrazine that remained represented an ominous countdown. The supplies lined up neatly in the medkit looked ample at first glance, but time was passing quickly. Once the drug ran out, Jor's condition would deteriorate rapidly. She was putting on a brave face, but clearly suffering. B'Elanna supposed she should count herself lucky that only one member of her team had been injured, not counting the tinnitus that she herself continued to experience intermittently. If they'd been nearer to the surface when the rockfall had occurred, there could have been more casualties – fatalities, even. But even one was one too many.

Vance returned and B'Elanna turned her eyes downwards as he passed. Like Nelson and Tabor, the pilot was now shirtless and she had no intention of letting him think she was checking him out. She needed to check her chrono anyway. Five more minutes and she'd rally them to start digging again. In the meantime, she was going to turn off her headlamp and rest her eyes. She picked a spot to sit down within earshot of the others, but far enough away that their light didn't reach her. When the sound of footsteps headed her way she sighed and opened her eyes. So much for five minutes undisturbed rest. At least the footsteps belonged to Sahreen.

"May I speak with you?" he asked.

She reached up and switched her lamp back on. "Of course."

He crouched beside her, hesitating for a long moment in a way that was unusual for him. She was about to snap at him to get on with it when he started to speak. "We've all been awake for twenty five hours straight," he said matter of factly.

"I know," she said, eyes narrowing. "What of it?"

"People are getting clumsy. A period of sleep would be advisable."

"Sleep? Are you serious?"

He nodded. Of course he was serious. When wasn't he? And the truth was, he was right. Sleep was advisable. But they were in a race against time here.

"Sleep's a luxury," she said, a little more sharply than she'd intended.

"Respectfully, no," he said, not appearing to have taken any offense at her tone. "Sleep is a necessity. A few hours would suffice to refresh us adequately and restore efficiency." He stretched his legs out in front of him to sit down properly, leaning back against the wall by her side, waiting.

"What about the stims in the medkit? Can't we use those?"

Shaking his head with as much animation as she'd ever seen from him, he said, "Bad idea. And, besides, there'd not be enough for everyone. I guarantee you'll notice how much faster we can work after proper rest."

She mulled it over. "All of us together? Or in shifts?"

Turning to look at him, she watched him shrug his shoulders. "Whichever you think best."

"Well, what do you suggest?"

He chewed his lip thoughtfully. "If we take turns to sleep, the digging effort will continue uninterrupted," he said.

"OK then," she replied, ready to rise and announce her decision.

"However," Sahreen continued, "we have established an efficient system that requires each member of the team to operate. It might be wiser to all rest simultaneously, then resume as one unit."

B'Elanna frowned. "Well, which is it then?"

His brow twitched, ever so slightly. "I don't understand."

"Which should we do?"

"That's up to you."

"Well," she said, growing more irritable, "I'm asking for your advice. You know the best course to take. You've got more experience than me."

He shook his head. "I've never been in this exact situation before."

"Well, I don't know what to do," she growled, throwing her hands up in front of her for emphasis. The heat was just unbearable, like being smothered in a warm, wet blanket and placed in an oven. With every heartbeat, the pulse in her right temple drummed and she worried the headache would progress to a full blown migraine. Just what she didn't need when analgesics were limited and she already had an injured teammate. Sahreen didn't respond, he just sat there, hands clasped together under his chin. B'Elanna hugged her knees to her chest and released a long sigh.

"Chakotay wouldn't have put you in command of this mission if he didn't think you were a capable leader," Sahreen said suddenly.

"Perhaps if this mission had gone to plan I would have been capable of leading it," she mumbled. "But it's gone to hell, hasn't it?"

"Even if you think so, you can't tell them that," Sahreen said, lowering his hands to his lap and tipping his head in the direction of the others.

"Do you really think I make a good leader?" she asked, not letting him respond. Not until she'd finished. "Tabor had to remind me about our water problem in the first instance and advise me on the food rationing. I've got Vance giving me his opinion on everything. Dalby acting like my personal bodyguard." She raised her palm. "I know he means well. And now you pull me aside because I'm doing something else wrong."

"Being a leader doesn't mean you must have all the answers. There's nothing wrong with taking advice. Or asking for it."

"No. I guess not."

She thought back to her time at the Academy. There'd been cadets who were clearly destined for command rather than to spend their whole careers at the helm or in technical or scientific posts. Cadets like Max Burke. He had the people skills to make it on the command track. Others, like herself, had been gifted in engineering, or astrophysics, or medicine, but would never be first officer or captain material. Perhaps if she thought of her people as parts of a living machine, the most practical course of action would become obvious.

"All right," she said, reaching a conclusion. Letting Sahreen heave her to her feet, she went to tell the others that their rest period would be longer than she'd initially planned. Perhaps a couple of hours in silent darkness would rid her of her headache too.

The news was well received by all, though Vance had to question the decision not to sleep in shifts.

"No, we'll sleep together," B'Elanna said firmly, only registering her regrettable choice of words after the fact when Vance snickered. "We'll sleep at the same time," she amended. "Four hours. Pick a spot and bed down."

If any one of them managed to sleep soundly in this heat and on the hard, unforgiving floor, she'd be amazed. For once, it transpired, she and Vance were on the same page, though unlike him, she hadn't deemed it good for morale to voice such a negative thought.

"Look at it this way," she responded to his grumbling. "After this, your bunk will seem a lot more comfortable."

He smirked, the obnoxious bastard. She cheered herself by fantasising about breaking his jaw, preferably in several places.

As she turned away from him the light caught on two small metallic discs hanging from a chain around his neck. She hadn't noticed them before. They looked like old fashioned military ID tags that she recalled from old holomovies; the sort that service personnel on Earth had carried in the days before DNA records and subcutaneous chips were commonplace. Vance wasn't the kind of guy to make fashion statements. They had to have some meaning. Maybe Seska would know.

The tunnel floor really was about as unpleasant a surface to sleep on as B'Elanna could imagine and it lived up to her expectations when she rolled up her vest to make a pillow and settled down. They'd turned off all the lights and each picked a spot to lie in, spreading out down the tunnel far enough apart to limit the noise from each other's breathing and shifting of positions. With the sounds of talking and digging fallen off, low creaking noises could be heard from above as if the mountain itself was moving.

It likely was. Once an avalanche or a landslide had occurred, secondary slippages were common among the unstable debris. That would be just typical: to clear a way out only to have it blocked again at the last moment.

She rolled onto her right side and pushed her right temple into her makeshift pillow. The leather was cool, at least initially, and the pressure eased the throbbing in her head, but the lack of support for her neck in that position forced her to roll back onto her back after a while. From somewhere in the darkness came a sneeze followed by a bout of racked coughing that echoed off the walls. Her stomachs gurgled, the meagre meal from five hours earlier had long since been digested.

They should have been back on the _Val Jean_ by now. Chell would have cooked what passed for a feast as he always did for returning away teams. There'd be rice or pasta, high-carb staples that the Maquis obtained in bulk for their long shelf lives and easy availability. Chell would have thrown in some spices (hopefully not too many) and whatever tinned or vacuum preserved vegetables were on hand. Depending on which planets the ship had most recently visited, there could be fresh produce as well. The settlers on Delavi had offered a crate of moba fruit and two of potatoes in return for the weapons and medical supplies that the Maquis had run through a Cardassian blockade. Chell would likely have boiled some of those up as well. The Bolian wasn't the best chef in the Galaxy, but undoubtedly there were worse to be found.

After the incident at Quatal, B'Elanna had suggested to Chakotay that Chell be asked to wait until an away team had returned fit and well before preparing the food. It seemed in bad taste to enjoy a large meal when not all of those who'd disembarked for the mission had come back unharmed. Chakotay disagreed, saying it wasn't good for morale to put too much emphasis on the possibility of a mission resulting in casualties. Pessimism was a distraction that cost lives. But right now, the crew on the ship would be staring at pots of steaming food laid out in the small mess hall. Or perhaps, by now, the food would have grown cold, their comrades with little appetite mulling around wondering just what fate had befallen the missing seven. Anyhow, the ship would have moved on from the rendezvous point, too risky to stay when the away team could have been captured and forced to divulge the coordinates.

Only B'Elanna, Vance and Sahreen knew those coordinates. They were the only three capable of piloting the shuttle, so in the event that all three of them were incapacitated or killed, knowing the location of the rendezvous point would be useless to the other four. Should the Cardassians manage to eliminate the _Val Jean_, the Maquis would be struck a significant blow. The ship carried an unusually large crew complement for a Maquis raider, with a high percentage of skilled personnel. It was an asset that had to be protected by any reasonable means.

Someone started to snore, just as B'Elanna felt the first hint of sleep upon her. She cursed inwardly, though at least it meant that one of them had dozed off. The snoring continued in an intermittent drone. Hopefully, the fact that no cross words had been issued forth meant that the others were all sleeping too. The culprit had to be Vance. If it were one of the others, he'd never be able to refrain from calling out and cursing them. Unless Vance was a really sound sleeper. The whole team would have to be really sound sleepers not to be disturbed by that racket. And she was sure Jor was a chronic insomniac. The other woman was often to be seen out of her bunk room during the ship's night cycle, even between missions. Come to think of it, Jor was often accompanied by Tabor at those times. The Bajoran certainly had plenty to keep him awake at night. In between the nightmares.

Checking her wrist chrono with its luminescent face, B'Elanna noted that merely half an hour had elapsed since lights out. There was still plenty of time to try to get some sleep.

..._ _ _...

_Day two_

_0600_

"You know," Vance started, "the longer the shuttle is out there, the more chance the Cardassians will detect it."

"Well there's not a lot we can do about that other than keep digging, is there?" Tabor countered.

They'd stopped for another five minute break to patch up their mistreated hands with the dermal regenerator and take on yet more foul water. Torres had reluctantly given the order that they should use the device as even with their makeshift protective coverings, each person's skin was being shredded by the sharp debris and the risk of infection was more of a concern than the risk of using more electricity.

The sleep had done little to refresh Nelson. He'd drifted off for perhaps ten minutes at a time with long intervals of wakefulness in between. The situation with Jor and her injuries had played on his mind in a continuous loop, and Dalby's snoring had carried down the tunnel and jerked him out of those short naps on several occasions. Not that Nelson wished a disturbed sleep on anyone, but he hoped one of the others had heard and would pack Dalby off far from the rest of them when it came to the next sleep period.

"If the Cardassians come, I will not be taken alive," Dalby said. "And I'd like to take some of them with me if it comes to it. I think …" he looked to Torres, "… if it's all right by you, we should discuss what we're gonna do in that eventuality."

"How do you mean?" Torres asked him.

Dalby gestured to the stack of weapons that Jor had neatly arranged earlier. "Phaser fire could bring the roof down on all of us. The decision to go out shooting or surrender … well, I figure we all have to make that for ourselves."

"If the Cardassians come, what's to say they won't use energy weapons themselves," pointed out Tabor.

Dalby nodded. "Fair point. I just thought we should have a plan. They could be waiting for us when we break out."

It was all very well to make such grandiose statements now, but, when it came down to it, would they all have the bottle to effectively take their own lives? The thought of being taken prisoner by the Cardassians made Nelson feel sick. He'd heard the stories, some confirmed and others only plausible rumours. In principle, he would far rather be killed than captured, but the instinct to survive was hardwired into every living being. If the Cardassians were in the mood to take prisoners – for information, or for sport – one moment of indecision could be all that was needed for them to disarm their victim.

Torres spoke up. "I'm not going to waste my energy thinking about it. If the Cardassians find the shuttle and explore the surroundings, they'll realise we're in trapped in here. They won't be relying on crappy technology like us. Their sensors will get around the magnesite. Do you think they'll waste their efforts on trying to get us out? They'll just leave us to die."

"And if they did try blasting through to us, we won't be around too long to worry about being taken alive," said Tabor. "Believe me, I know very well how the Cardassians treat prisoners, but B'Elanna's right, we can't worry about every possible thing that could happen."

"By tomorrow, our warp trail will have dissipated. Then there'll be nothing to point them toward this system," said Sahreen.

Vance had said nothing since his initial – unhelpful – insight. He'd just stood back and watched the discussion play out in front of him, his eyes hovering on Torres for much of the time. For her part, she appeared – or at least she acted – oblivious to his interest, maintaining her focus on Dalby. Now Vance turned to Tabor. "Unless they've surveyed this system in the past and they know about these tunnels. Let's face it, the Cardies could have this system on one of their patrol routes, and, knowing about the tunnels, they might swing by and take a gander even without picking up any warp trails. Like you said, these tunnels are the ideal place to hide supplies or a listening post. Or just to hide out."

Vance really was determined to pile on the shit. And stir it. He gave Torres a challenging stare. She returned it before taking the dermal regenerator offered by Dalby. Even in the dim light Nelson noted the four small crescent-shaped indents Torres bore in each palm. After running the device briefly over her palms and fingers, she wordlessly shuffled back up to the face, the others arranging themselves into a line behind her. Back to work.

Nelson found himself at the rear with Vance ahead of him. Seska's intel on Vance was rather lacking – or, she wasn't sharing (but that seemed unlikely) – and the man himself, though certainly a talker, had very little to say regarding the subject of his past. Known facts were: he was a volunteer not a mercenary; a qualified pilot, but not ex-Starfleet; and he hailed from New Woolwich. When that colony world had started suffering Cardassian intimidation, and looked likely to be handed over to Cardassia in the treaty, most of the colonists had gladly agreed to resettlement on New France. Those colonists were a rare exception to the rule, but New Woolwich had never exactly thrived; it barely qualified as class M and the colony had never achieved self-sufficiency. The agricultural opportunities on New France were far better.

Whether Vance had had a personal run in with the Cardassians somewhere along the line was unknown. Perhaps he had nowhere else to go, nothing better to do than to join the Maquis. When they ran weapons drills against static targets he was always up there with the best of them. He did seem to enjoy using a phaser rifle, but he didn't have the reputation for savagery of that creepy Betazoid guy, Suder.

"You got something to say, mate?" Vance grunted, as he trudged into view and caught Nelson staring.

"Not to you, _mate_," Nelson answered, startling himself with his own petulance. His foster parents would not have appreciated that kind of tone.

Vance's thick eyebrows rose in surprise. "Probably wise," he said, handing off his load.

Vance's most recent display of disregard for Torres had only lowered Nelson's opinion of him further. Which led Nelson to make another interesting observation: for someone who could be so difficult to get along with herself, Torres had a remarkable ability for inspiring loyalty. And that couldn't be a bad thing for someone tasked with command.

..._ _ _...

_1300_

Despite what B'Elanna had said to the contrary, Dalby's pronouncement had got her thinking. Fighting to the death was a very Klingon philosophy. She recalled the stories her mother had subjected her to of Klingon warriors that surrendered bringing dishonour upon themselves and their families for three generations. Of a death that took with it an enemy's life being the most honourable passing that one could have. Honour wasn't really a prime consideration here, but B'Elanna couldn't help spending a fleeting moment wondering how her mother would view her daughter's current activities and the possibility that B'Elanna, who had made every effort to ignore or belittle everything Klingon, might die in battle. Would her mother be proud? Upset? Surprised?

Despite their government being a signatory of the Seldonis IV Convention, the Cardassians were notorious for their ill-treatment of prisoners of war. When it came to those they considered unlawful combatants – and therefore not entitled to POW status – such as members of the Bajoran resistance and now the Maquis, there wasn't even that paper-thin promise that a detainee could hope to be treated humanely.

Dalby had learnt first-hand just how depraved the Cardassians could be, so his concerns were unsurprising. He'd been working as a mechanic in a remote farming community on a planet on the Bajoran frontier. One day he'd headed into town for parts, not knowing that, as he left the settlement, the neighbours whose respect he'd worked hard to earn and the woman he'd settled down with were about to endure a brutal attack by a gang of Cardassian thugs. The Cardassians always picked the outlying communities for their intimidation attacks, leaving the more heavily defended spaceports and commercial hubs alone. When Dalby returned to his village, he found neighbours slaughtered in the fields as they worked, slumped over their farm machinery. Others had been lined up beside the irrigation ditches and shot in small groups. Picking up his pace, Dalby had raced towards the cluster of buildings that accommodated the farmers and associated workers. The Cardassians had left a handful of witnesses alive to recount the full, horrific details of the assault to the other colonists. Not that any of the survivors were in a fit state to do so immediately.

Dalby's boss, a stern, robust man in late middle age, was one such survivor. Dalby found him babbling hysterically and incoherently outside the schoolhouse, his clothes soaked with blood, but with no visible injuries. A couple of others – Tora Meru, the elderly Bajoran lady who doubled as both medic and teacher, and Liu Chang, the teenager whose parents looked after the Rigellian cattle – huddled together in the central courtyard, both ashen-faced and dumbstruck. Dalby had burst into his own home to find his girlfriend bleeding out on the living room floor. He'd barely recognised her, holding out hope for a few seconds that it was some other poor woman and not her. But it was her. She was unconscious, though still breathing faintly. He'd had to leave her in order to summon help. When he returned to her side a few moments later, she was dead.

The authorities, such as they were, had arrived from town, managing to coax some of the details out of the three shell-shocked villagers. Those three and Dalby were the only four left alive from a community of fifty people. The bodies of the Bolian family were never found.

Pained as he was by every retelling of the tale, Dalby was quite willing to share the reason he'd joined the Maquis. It was vital to him that the extent of the Cardassians' depravity was made known. In leaving live witnesses to this atrocity and others, the Cardassians had hoped to scare away the remaining colonists. Instead, they had provided more ammunition for the Maquis to use in their recruitment drive.

B'Elanna shuddered involuntarily. No, when that was how the Cardassians treated civilians, there was no hope that any captured Maquis would be spared the same abuse.

Dalby had only one fate in mind for himself. He had no illusions that he was going to grow old and die in his bed, an old man. The Maquis couldn't win this war as things currently stood politically. Unless the attitude of the Federation changed or a third party intervened, there would be a perpetual stalemate. The Maquis as a group would survive, but the life expectancy for individual members was never going to be long.

There were numerous ways that B'Elanna's time in the Maquis could end. She could be captured by Starfleet or killed by Cardassians. She could be the victim of an accident, like Forel who'd been blown up by the bomb he was planting. She could die from sickness; Federation-quality medicine was a rare thing out here on the frontier. Or by starving in a dirty hole on the ground, through her own ineptness.

Nobody retired from the Maquis. Anyone who talked of leaving was looked upon extremely suspiciously by their fellow fighters. The information on tactics and past missions that each held would be tempting to Starfleet or the Cardassians, even worth money on the black market. Most wouldn't dream of betraying their comrades, but not everyone was in it for the cause. The Maquis were forced to recruit mercenaries on occasion; pilots were particularly hard to come by, especially those skilled enough to navigate the treacherous Badlands and evade patrols.

There was no going back to the Federation now. Even if she risked it, her activities would eventually catch up with her and she'd be arrested, charged, tried and convicted before landing up in one of their rehabilitation centres. And with a criminal record, she'd never get any decent, honest work on a Federation planet or Federation registered ship.

The greatest thing the Maquis had given her was a purpose. Yes, she'd made friends too, but the cause, a reason to get up in the morning, activity to fill her days without the rigidity of the Academy, that was a gift. It was unfortunate that that gift only existed because of the misfortune of millions of people.

When she'd walked off that San Francisco campus for the last time with no particular destination picked out, it had occurred to her that if her mother wanted to get in contact, there was no available forwarding address. It hadn't seemed too important at the time. That last argument had still been fresh and raw in B'Elanna's memory. Any overtures on the part of her mother would not have been welcomed then. And now, over a year later, with things being as they were, any attempt to make contact with her mother would be unwise. But the thought that if she were to die out here and her mother would never know her daughter's fate … that was unsettling. Perhaps there was some way she could get a message through. Something neutral in tone. Factual, but without revealing anything compromising. She certainly had many hours ahead in which to think about it.

..._ _ _...

_0000_

Torres had decided that another sleep period was necessary. She gave the order to stop work with a reluctant sigh, but hands were fumbling and feet were tripping, and the pace of work was suffering for it.

Nelson couldn't sleep. He'd lain uncomfortably for a solid hour, his heart hammering and his mind unable to switch off. It was hard to forget that the gates, walls and roof of their temporary prison held the potential energy to blow them all into tiny pieces. He was simply too agitated to rest, compelled to move his body in some way, even if it was merely a long walk along the tunnel and back. Edging his way downslope until he was clear of the others, he turned on his headtorch and strolled past the latrine area, which, despite infrequent use, was starting to smell overwhelming, to the junction where the east and west branches met. He chose east and as he picked up his pace to really burn off some of the anxiety he was feeling, a point of light approaching from the distance caught his eye: Sahreen, his pack laden with refilled water bottles, on his way back to the group.

"Aren't you tired?" Nelson asked him as they paused together.

"A little."

Nelson's eyes narrowed. "Did you sleep at all last night?"

A faint smile graced Sahreen's lips, gone as quickly as it had manifested. "No," he admitted. "I didn't."

Sahreen had finally removed his vest. For some reason he eschewed the leather that the majority of the Maquis wore – almost like a uniform – in favour of knitted wool. Even in the heat he'd barely broken a sweat, but finally it seemed the conditions were starting to wear on him too. He set down his pack and lowered himself to the floor to sit cross-legged. Nelson accepted the older man's invitation to join him. Some company would be good.

"I can't sleep either," Nelson said, rather unnecessarily. Sahreen handed him a flask. They'd long since stopped worrying about which water container belonged to whom. Compared to the muck they were swallowing, what were a few germs?

They talked for a while, Nelson pressing Sahreen for his knowledge of uridium mining and Sahreen recounting everything he knew on that subject. And then the conversation moved on to politics: the significance of the wormhole to the Gamma Quadrant and the strategic value of Deep Space Nine, the Bajoran Provisional Government and from there, naturally to Cardassia.

"Why … why do you think they're like they are, the Cardassians?" Nelson broached. It was a question that he'd mulled over frequently in recent times, yet had never found anyone with whom he felt he could actually discuss it sensibly.

Sahreen regarded him. Uncomprehendingly. That was irregular. Nelson took it to indicate a poorly worded question on his part. "Aggressive. Indiscriminately cruel," he added.

"I'm sure they're not all like that. In fact … I know they're not," said Sahreen, a flash of something Nelson couldn't quite grasp crossing the other man's features.

Nelson laughed bitterly. "You've met a … _nice _Cardassian?"

Sahreen held his gaze for a long moment, then nodded once, slowly.

"When?"

"It was a long time ago. Before the Border Wars."

Nelson's eyes widened and before he could stop himself he blurted, "How old _are_ you?"

"Older than I look and younger than I feel," Sahreen answered, saying nothing more specific on the topic. Nelson made some quick calculations, cross-referenced the answers with the dates he recalled from his Federation History classes, and concluded that he needed further information before he could make any assumptions. He reverted to his original line of questioning.

"Then … those good Cardassians … why don't they do something to stop the others – the gangs that terrorise the colonists in the DMZ, or those who perpetrated the atrocities on Bajor?"

"You know your Earth history. World War Two, World War Three … the conflicts in between … There was genocide, slavery, war crimes of every variety. Sometimes atrocities were carried out by a small minority, at other times they were state-sanctioned. Cruelty isn't a trait unique to Cardassians."

"No, of course not," Nelson conceded before letting Sahreen continue.

"You must have known cruel humans – bullies – and when you get a few people like that together, they spur each other on and dominate whoever's around them. The others follow like a herd of sheep."

Nelson could most certainly recall mob rule in the school yard, the charismatic kids who others blindly followed without thinking about the rationality or morality of what they were doing. He'd stood by and watched as names (or even objects) had been flung at unfortunates, even to his now shame finding a sadistic amusement in some of the practical jokes that had been played on those unlikely to hit back.

And in Earth History class, he'd studied the rise of fascism in 20th century Europe, the long-lived communist dictatorships of East Asia, and, going back further, the centuries of human history where slavery had not just been tolerated, but had been the foundation on which whole societies relied.

Sahreen went on, "After a while, their violent behaviour becomes normalised, or people turn a blind eye, pretending not to know what their neighbours are up to. Blissful ignorance. It's safer not to know or not to care, at least. Certainly not to speak up. They're frightened." He paused to take a long draft of water. "Cardassia isn't like the Federation. The news that's disseminated to the general population is heavily government-controlled. They don't have a good reputation for the way they treat their own citizens."

Nelson got the distinct impression that Sahreen was holding something back. Many things, perhaps. Which was, of course, his prerogative. With Seska's way of wheedling information out of people – without them even realising they were giving it up – it paid to be cautious about sharing anything one wanted to keep confidential with anyone. Thank God, Seska wasn't Betazoid. Though Nelson wouldn't have minded the benefit of telepathy himself these last few months.

"Do you think they'll ever change?" Nelson asked. "The Cardassians as a whole."

Arching an eyebrow, Sahreen thought for a moment. "I hope so. Something dramatic might have to happen to their society first though. There'll always be violent elements. I don't see Cardassia emulating Vulcan in that regard. We all have that capability within us, for extreme behaviour. Members of the Maquis included. Perhaps especially. It just takes less provocation for some than others."

And on the subject of Betazoids … "Some like … Suder?" Nelson ventured, regretting the comment an instant later when Sahreen's neutral expression turned ever so slightly disapproving.

"I'd prefer not to speculate regarding specific individuals," Sahreen censured.

Which presumably meant that the rumours were true. If Sahreen believed that Suder was innocent of any brutality, he'd more than likely defend the Betazoid.

It was via Seska that Nelson had heard of an incident a few months back, where Suder had been part of a Maquis team sent to attack a recently-established Cardassian colony on Portas IX. The assault was supposed to send a message: that the Maquis would not let the Cardassians (whether government-sanctioned or vigilante) commit violence and even murder without reprisals. According to Seska, the Maquis team was supposed to issue a warning to the Cardassian colonists giving them an hour to evacuate before they would be forcibly evicted.

The Cardassian colony was inhabited by civilians, with no troops stationed for their defence. A couple of passenger vessels left just before the hour deadline expired. But sensors showed Cardassian lifesigns remaining on the planet after the time had elapsed. Atmospheric conditions precluded transporter use, so Suder and a dozen other fighters had taken a shuttle down to the planet with orders to restrain the remaining Cardassians. They would be ferried to a neutral planet and let free.

Most of the Cardassians – scientists who refused to leave their botanical research – had soon been subdued, but several, armed with disruptors, had resisted capture. Eventually, seeing that they were outnumbered, the armed scientists had voiced their desire to surrender. Suder and Navarro had (allegedly) cornered one of them in a blind alley, the Cardassian with his hands on his head and his disruptor safely laid on the ground a few paces in front of him. Whilst Navarro was taking a set of wrist restraints out of her backpack, Suder had slit the Cardassian's throat, claiming that the soon-to-be prisoner was moving towards his weapon.

Unfortunately, Navarro had perished soon after, when she'd (allegedly) failed to observe the proper safety procedures when repairing one of the _Val Jean_'s airlocks and been sucked out into space. In any case, few of the Maquis were interested in there being any kind of inquest into the death of a Cardassian.

But Nelson kept his fingers crossed that he'd never end up alone with Suder. There was something very off with the man.

Feeling a little uncomfortable now that he'd said the wrong thing, Nelson politely thanked Sahreen for the chat and decided that he would try again to get some rest. Sahreen said that he'd stay where he was for a while and bring the rest of the water along by the time the sleep period was over.

Nelson wandered back towards the others, accompanied by the loud grumbling of his neglected stomach.

Above and around him, the mountain creaked and groaned in sympathy.

..._ _ _...


	5. Chapter 5

**Chapter Five**

_Day three_

_0300_

There was now visible progress, at least. Where they were moving rubble backwards, piles of rocks filled out the frequent indents in the tunnel wall making it more streamlined – and narrower than before. According to the Bolian tricorder, open air was indeed getting closer, but no one was prepared to put too much confidence in those figures.

Downslope, Nelson and Jor spoke in hushed tones. Something the young man said raised a small smile from the injured woman. Beside B'Elanna, Tabor fidgeted.

"Are you jealous of him?" she asked softly.

Slowly, Tabor turned to face her. "What?"

B'Elanna gave a subtle nod towards Nelson, who was now rummaging in the medkit on his lap.

Tabor shifted again, reaching around and brushing away some gravel that had been impinging on his rear. "No. Why?"

"You seem very interested in their conversation."

His eyes turned downwards before flicking back up to hers to stare intently, unblinking, as if he were consciously overriding his body's natural embarrassment responses. "I'm just concerned about her injuries."

B'Elanna sighed, perplexed as to why she was even pursuing this line of discussion. Some things were best left to run their course. They would resolve as they were meant to. This was likely one of those situations, but, still, she couldn't stop the words tripping off her tongue. Tabor was a friend, and she was curious. "She's not interested in him. Not … you know, in that way."

"That …" he said, blinking now, "… wouldn't be any of my business."

"She mothers him. That's all that's going on there."

Tabor ran a hand through his short hair, considering. "That's … good, I suppose. I don't think it would be a good idea to … get involved with a friend. Would you?"

B'Elanna shook her head decisively. "I think it would be a terrible idea. And, regardless, the Maquis isn't really the place for people to be pairing up like that. But, if other people think differently, then that's up to them. As long as it doesn't compromise operations." Seska's infatuation with Chakotay – and his reciprocation to a lesser degree – was the worst kept secret on the ship. As far as B'Elanna could tell, Chakotay's ability to make impartial decisions hadn't been affected. Yet. But there was always time.

Tabor laughed softly and changed the subject somewhat. "Jor's only three years older than Nelson, you know."

"But he seems younger … no. Actually … it's more like she seems older."

Tabor nodded. "She's been through a hell of a lot."

"You say that like you haven't," B'Elanna said. If trauma could be measured by body count alone, Tabor had lost more than anyone else she knew: his grandfather and brother to some sick Cardassian medical experimentation; his father worked to death in a Cardassian labour camp; cousins, uncles and aunts murdered in one of Gul Dukat's collective punishment exercises, where whole villages would be obliterated in retaliation for a single citizen's involvement in resistance activity.

"I never knew anything different to living under the Occupation until I was nearly an adult. Jor had a peaceful life until she was that same age. It's … more of a shock, I think, to undergo hardship when you've been privileged before. More … aging."

"Maybe."

"Take Doyle, for example. He looks ten years older than Li Paz, and they share the same birth date. Doyle lost everything he had to the Cardassians in one day. Li Paz barely had anything to start with."

She didn't remind him that Bajorans age more slowly than humans. His point was still well made. B'Elanna was reminded again just how different her background was to most of the other Maquis.

Nelson made his way over as Jor shuffled off down the slope into the darkness.

"Ready to go?" B'Elanna asked with an enthusiastic tone that she was trying to translate into feeling.

The young man nodded. The darkening shadow of stubble – and, of course, dirt – did make him look older than his years. But he didn't have that haunted look that some of the others did. Yet. B'Elanna sighed to herself. If they got out of here, there'd be another mission, then another. That haunted look would grow on him, slowly, as he gained more experience of the war. Or, if he were very unlucky, it would hit him like a photon torpedo; that fresh face would be there one day, and gone the next, the result of some major traumatic incident. It was a shame.

But perhaps by the time that happened to Nelson, she would have undergone that same change herself, and things like that would be beyond her notice.

..._ _ _...

_1000_

Break times were starting to become even more volatile flash points. Any opportunity to catch their breath meant they had a small amount of energy to expend on talking. And thanks to the heat, the hunger, their sore bodies, and the general squalor, talk meant trouble.

"When we get back to the ship I'm going to take the longest sonic shower of my life," Jor said wearily. "It'll take hours in there to get the dust out of every pore."

Vance sneered. "Maybe Torres can increase the power to the acoustic inverters. You know how good she is at upgrades."

B'Elanna lifted her head in time to see Dalby throw down his empty flask and in two quick strides reach Vance, shoving the pilot backwards by the shoulders until he was backed against the wall.

"Just what is your problem with Torres?" Dalby growled.

Vance pushed Dalby back a pace in return. "Ain't it obvious? Look at the mess she's got us into!"

Dalby shook his head, waving a finger between them before landing it on Vance's chest. "No. Your attitude was bad before we even got on the shuttle."

B'Elanna felt the mouthful of ration bar she'd just swallowed without adequately chewing stick painfully somewhere between her throat and her stomachs. "Leave it, Ken," she croaked.

"My attitude's my choice," Vance said, eyes wild beneath his bushy eyebrows, which sat like two fat caterpillars on his forehead. How had she not noticed the resemblance before?

Dalby persisted. "You got a problem taking orders from a woman or something?"

Vance shook his head, scoffing, "No. Course I ain't."

"That's it, isn't it? You'll listen to Chakotay. Or Li Paz. But, what? You've got some medieval attitude to women being in charge?"

"I already said no, you moron."

"Because she's half-Klingon then?"

B'Elanna almost laughed. If there was one thing Vance definitely did not have a problem with, it was with the fact she was part-Klingon.

And Vance was now, in fact, laughing. "You really want to know why I have a beef with Torres?" he asked Dalby, before expanding his question to include the additional audience that he'd mustered.

"No," B'Elanna snapped at Vance. "He doesn't need to know. The rest of us don't need to know either." She, at least, had a pretty good idea already. Hell, the man was just …

"Well, I'm gonna tell you what my problem is," Vance said, ignoring her and continuing to hold the entire team's attention.

B'Elanna made a mental note that whenever in future she felt a situation couldn't get any worse, she would remember that it could. It could always get worse.

Vance pointed at her, not taking his eyes off Dalby. "She's not one of us. She shouldn't be here."

The lump of ration bar finally dislodged from her chest. Her jaw relaxed. Vance's explanation was intended as a slight, but, depending on interpretation, the first part could be deemed true. Regardless, that was nothing close to what B'Elanna had been expecting him to say. In fact, she was so taken aback with a weird mixture of relief and confusion that for a long moment she was rendered speechless.

Tabor posed her question in her stead. "What do you mean 'she shouldn't be here'?" he asked, scrambling to his feet.

"Or 'not one of us'," added Dalby.

Vance was unperturbed as Tabor approached him. "She's from a cosy little Federation colony world that's never been touched by war or political cock ups. She ain't lost her home like a lot of us have. Or her family. She doesn't need to be here."

"Hey!" B'Elanna shouted, throwing her meagre meal off her lap and finally rising. "You don't know anything about my family."

"They ain't dead, are they?" Vance yelled back, making eye contact with her now. "Or in a Cardassian labour camp?"

"No," she said, matching his frown and wishing she'd not responded to his tirade in the first place. Really, she should have just let him prattle on. Again, the majority of what he said was the truth.

"Then you shouldn't be here. You should be back home on Kessik IV, or Earth, or anywhere else. But we don't need outsiders dying for our cause. We got enough deaths out here already."

She couldn't decide whether she was more surprised that he'd remembered the name of her home planet, or at the seemingly noble sentiment in his argument.

"My motivations are none of your business," she snapped. "But I owed Chakotay a debt. And I can do some good in the Maquis. I'm not in this for latinum, or because I like violence." And she sat back down again, resolving now to say nothing more on the subject.

"If it wasn't for outside help, the Maquis would never have got organised enough or strong enough to become an effective resistance," Tabor said, indignantly.

Sahreen spoke up next. "We need the expertise of ex-Starfleet officers and skilled people like B'Elanna. You know how low tech many of the colonies are. There isn't the skill base to draw upon for retrofitting our ships with weapons or enhancing their defences. Willingness to fight does not on its own make good soldiers."

Having said his piece and with, evidently, nothing more he could add, Vance skulked off back to the face.

"I wish I hadn't opened my mouth," said Jor.

"It's not your fault," Tabor assured her.

"Sorry, B'Elanna," Jor added.

B'Elanna pressed the heels of her hands into her temples. "Forget it."

"But if I hadn't mentioned the sonic showers –"

"I said forget it," B'Elanna snapped. "Please … let's just get on, shall we?"

Jor retreated out of B'Elanna's way. Tabor went to join Vance in the front, for which B'Elanna was extremely thankful. Dalby poured the dregs of his flask over his head, shaking off the droplets like a wet dog: a Rottweiler, perhaps, B'Elanna thought wryly.

Standing still, waiting for instructions, was Nelson. The young man had hung back from the altercation, taking it all in but saying nothing. She sent him forward, keeping Dalby back with her. Sahreen, seeing that tensions had abated, took his leave.

And all was quiet again. At least until the next time.

..._ _ _...

_1400_

As if Dalby wasn't hot-tempered enough by default, he'd now had the misfortune to develop a widespread and itchy rash. Not that the rash was immediately noticeable to an observer. The low light and grime made sure of that. But, when he approached B'Elanna quietly and pointed out the raised, red bumps on his chest, back, and arms, she winced at their severity.

"When did this start?" B'Elanna asked.

"I don't know. A few hours ago, maybe," Dalby answered. "I was hoping it would just go away."

Unfortunately, Dalby hadn't spoken softly enough for his affliction to escape Vance's notice.

"Maybe you should stick to the nice girls on the ship, instead of those spaceport slappers," Vance quipped from a few paces away.

Reluctantly, B'Elanna put out an arm to keep Dalby from moving.

"Fuck off, Vance," Dalby yelled. "It's from the heat and humidity in here."

"OK, mate. Chill out," Vance said, snickering again at his own turn of phrase.

"I'm not your _mate_. None of us are your _mates_," Dalby spat.

B'Elanna nodded in agreement, but bit her tongue to keep her participation to a minimum. Leaving Dalby and Vance to keep working, she sought out Jor and the medkit. There had to be some kind of antihistamine in there. That was another thing to add to her list of mental notes for when they ever got back to the _Val Jean_: familiarise herself with the contents of the medkits.

The hyposprays in the kit were all labelled with the drug name and strength, but without an indication or dosage. Of course, the dosage would depend on a variety of factors such as the indication itself. B'Elanna couldn't remember anything from her Academy courses that would help her decide which hypospray would help Dalby. She'd only completed a few hours of field medicine during Professor Zakarian's survival skills course and that had all been about CPR, splinting fractures, and applying tourniquets.

Subtly, Jor passed B'Elanna the medical tricorder. "Do you need this?" Jor asked.

Of course. Why the hell hadn't she thought to use the tricorder before ignorantly searching through the medications? Offering Jor a tight smile, B'Elanna yelled for Dalby to make his way down to her. The last thing she needed was Vance to learn of her latest failure.

With the tricorder confirming Dalby's self-diagnosis, it flashed up a treatment suggestion. Unfortunately, the first three drugs indicated weren't available, but number four was there, and in good quantity.

"How are you doing for lectrazine?" B'Elanna asked Jor after Dalby had been treated and left a lot happier.

"Seven doses left," Jor replied, confirming the estimate B'Elanna had had in mind.

Roughly twenty-eight hours' worth.

"Don't worry about me," Jor said calmly. "I'm tougher than I look."

B'Elanna had never really considered the impression that Jor's appearance gave before now, but, on reflection, the other woman did always look a little pale and not exactly… robust. But Jor had already proven that she was no weakling by bouncing back from the hell she'd gone through on Salva IV. B'Elanna did take comfort in that. There were others in the Maquis who, in Jor's situation, would be panicking and making the bad situation far worse.

For B'Elanna to appear anxious herself would not show Jor the respect she deserved, nor would it be in any way helpful. They could only work with the numbers they had. And there was simply only one way to meet that twenty-eight hour deadline, and it didn't involve standing around.

Nodding her acknowledgment of Jor's assertion, B'Elanna quickly got back to work.

..._ _ _...

_0030_

"I really don't want to stop," Dalby said with polite insistence as B'Elanna called them all to a halt once again. "We're making real progress now, even if the tricorder's off by a large margin. I'm happy to keep going on my own. I can manage."

"If you keep working, you'll disturb the others," B'Elanna told him. The irony was that if he slept he would disturb the others too. Even with his relocation to the furthest practicable reaches of the tunnel, his snoring still carried to the others' ears. "I'm sorry, Ken."

Dalby shrugged but wandered off without further protest. If it weren't for Jor and the dangerous lack of coordination that both Tabor and Vance had developed, B'Elanna might have had them all work on. She was in no frame of mind to rest herself, though her need for deep, restorative sleep was obvious. She would try to close her eyes for a while. They were itchy and sore, gummed up with a yellow discharge, no doubt a consequence of the dust particles suspended in the air. But first she intended to stretch her legs

A single dot of light in the distance downslope indicated Sahreen's position. As B'Elanna approached and the beam of her headlight merged with that of his palm beacon, she found him sat cross-legged on the ground, a small oblong stylus in one hand and a book (a real paper book?) in his lap. On closer inspection the stylus had a real inked nib. B'Elanna hadn't used one of those since high school English class, though charcoal pencils and real paper had occasionally been used for technical drawing at the Academy.

"What are you writing?" she asked quietly, crouching beside him.

It was only when she spoke that he looked up. "A journal, of sorts."

"On real paper with ink."

He nodded. "I find it … relaxing."

"Are you writing in some kind of code?"

He shook his head and tilted the open page in her direction, inviting her to look down. It wasn't English, nor any language of the Latin alphabet, but a series of pictograms – or were they logograms? She wasn't quite sure of the correct terminology. "Standardised Chinese," he said.

"You speak Chinese?" She shouldn't have been at all surprised.

He nodded at her superfluous question. Averting her eyes from the journal – it might have been incomprehensible to her, but it still seemed polite to grant him some privacy – she asked him, "But is that wise? I mean from an intelligence point of view. An unencrypted record of your activities … What if it got lost and fell into Cardassian or Starfleet's hands?"

Asking such a question of Sahreen seemed inherently wrong, like asking Dalby if he'd checked the power packs for the phaser rifles were adequately charged, or Seska if she was keeping her ear to the ground. Would Sahreen even know how to behave unwisely?

He arched an eyebrow, addressing her unwarranted concerns with a hint of … amusement? "It's not a detailed account. No names or places. It's more … impressions. A vague record of my thoughts and feelings."

B'Elanna's eyes widened at that last part. Sahreen's mouth twitched ever so slightly, curling upwards by a millimetre or two. For him that was tantamount to a broad grin. "I do have feelings, despite the rumours to the contrary," he said evenly.

Clearing her throat, B'Elanna chanced her arm. "Rumours?" she probed rhetorically.

A definite, faint smile now graced his lips. "I know what people say about me. The _Val Jean_'s not that big and," he dropped his pen into the crease of the open book and reached up to tug on his ear, "I have great hearing."

Was that an admission that there was some truth in those rumours? Or was he teasing her? After letting her stare dumbly and slack-jawed for a moment he then directed her attention to the abrasions on his hands. "But I don't bleed green."

B'Elanna cleared her throat. "No … of course you don't," she stuttered, before making her excuses and taking her leave.

Slinking back to her sleeping position, she turned her headlight off before closing in on the others, memorising the number of steps to where her vest and jacket were bundled on the ground and feeling for them as she got there. Despite her pessimism that she would, she must have drifted off, because when a low moaning reached her ears it startled her out of a dream: a bizarre nightmare in which she was suffocating, while a crowd of onlookers stood by pointing and laughing.

The moaning was coming from upslope. Definitely one of the men, but not Dalby and not Sahreen. Feeling her way along the wall – she knew no one lay flush against it on the left – she approached the source of the noise. It was Vance, she could tell from his scent. That particular Klingon ability was handy at times. If only the Klingon genes afforded her night vision too then she would be able to see the positions of his arms as he audibly flailed them about. For all she despised the man, the anguished sounds he was making were such that she would not have wished anybody to make. If there were words amongst the whimpers, then they were unintelligible. Whatever Vance was dreaming about, it was surely worse than what she had just experienced in her own sleep.

It seemed cruel to let him continue to suffer through it, but to attempt to rouse him in this state – in the dark – did not seem wise, so B'Elanna edged back the way she'd come, found her 'bed' again, and slumped down.

A few long minutes later, Vance fell silent.

..._ _ _...

_0700_

B'Elanna knew, of course, that Jor was quickly getting through the vials of lectrazine in the medkit. Digging and carrying, while requiring some focus, didn't use a whole lot of contemplative reasoning power, and, in the last few hours especially, the injured woman had been constantly in B'Elanna's thoughts. There were three doses of the cardiovascular-stabilising drug left, amounting to twelve more hours of treatment. Jor had been holding back somewhat on the analgesics in order for those to last longer, but that wasn't going to matter when the other, even more vital drug was depleted.

Nevertheless, Sahreen reminded B'Elanna of the predicament, calling her aside after his latest water delivery.

"I am aware of the situation," B'Elanna muttered, running a hand up to the back of her neck to try and knead some life back into the taut muscles there.

"Of course," Sahreen acknowledged with a deferential bow of his head.

B'Elanna studied him as he made no attempt to move away and let her get back to work. "Are you saying we should cut back her dosage?" she asked eventually, glancing over to where Jor was preparing to distribute the next food ration. The last food ration. "Should she increase the interval between each dose?"

Sahreen laid a hand on B'Elanna's forearm. A surprisingly cool hand. "There'd be no point," he said. "I expect the drug is barely keeping her internal bleeding in check as it is."

B'Elanna had heard Jor tell Tabor that she had blood in her urine when she thought B'Elanna wasn't listening.

"But you have a suggestion?" B'Elanna pressed, growing more impatient.

"I think any activity is exacerbating the bleeding."

"I've told her she doesn't need to be helping us carry rocks."

"Perhaps …" Sahreen grimaced. "You should be more persuasive."

B'Elanna sighed. Another black mark against her command skills. If this was a Starfleet operation, the mission report would not make flattering reading. Sahreen was right. Again. It was extremely fortunate that the man didn't have 'smug' in his emotional repertoire.

Jor wasn't best pleased when B'Elanna told her – yet again – not to partake in the digging efforts.

"I can manage, B'Elanna, really. I want to contribute," Jor pleaded.

"But we don't know how much damage you're doing to yourself. You should lie still. Only move if you absolutely need to."

Jor's shoulders slumped even more than they were already. "Is that an order?" she asked evenly.

B'Elanna considered. "Actually, yes. I am making it an order," she said apologetically. "After we next eat, you rest. Horizontally."

They all knew already that this 'meal' was to be the last of the food. Tabor's suggestion had been a good one, but there was a practical limit to how long they could make it last out. Once the MRE packets were opened, the contents would quickly spoil in the prevailing conditions. The ration bars were inherently crumbly, and to break them into even smaller pieces just entailed losing crumbs onto the ground where they mingled with the dirt and were lost.

With the last of the ration bars already consumed, the issue of their crumbliness was no longer relevant. B'Elanna watched Jor as she carefully divided the two remaining MREs between seven empty mess tins, squeezing out the packets – even cutting them open with a knife to scrape out the inner lining. Not a morsel was to be wasted. With the sick, empty feeling in her stomach, to B'Elanna Starfleet rations had never looked so appetising.

..._ _ _ ...

"Here," Jor said as she handed Nelson her ration: a quarter of an MRE of some sort in a mess tin and half a stringy maaza stalk. "You need this more than I do."

They stood slightly apart from the others. Jor was gathering what materials she could to make herself more comfortable on the hard floor: jackets, vests, even the sweat-soaked T-shirts that all the men but Sahreen had discarded. Nelson frowned at her offering, but, before he could protest verbally, Vance was leering over his shoulder.

"Oi, what's this?" Vance grabbed the thin piece of maaza stalk and brandished it in Jor's face, simultaneously elbowing Nelson aside so forcefully that he stumbled against the wall, grunting as the air was knocked out of his lungs. "I'm only getting three spoonfuls of this slop. Why's he getting more food than me?" Vance growled. "Hey? Did you keep back food when we were all handing it in to the pool?"

Jor scowled up at the pilot, ripping the stalk back from him, the sharp movement causing her visible pain. "No! It's my rations from last night and this morning. Mine to do what I like with."

Nelson recovered his poise and it took all the self-control he possessed not to strike Vance. Maybe he should just let fly with his fists. Vance had been asking for a smack in the face for days now, even if Nelson had never been the direct recipient of the man's temper. Jor looked ready to throttle him herself, and Tabor now posed a menacing figure to her right. In the end, Torres got to Vance first, barging into the middle of the altercation and slapping Vance hard across the cheek with her palm. The crack served to mute the other conversation that was taking place along the tunnel and to bring reinforcements: Dalby racing to Torres's side as Vance drew up to his full height and Sahreen gazing over with an expression that, for him, advertised his concern like a flaming beacon. The pilot rubbed his injured cheek with his left hand and drew back his right in a clenched fist. It hovered at his shoulder, shaking, as did his entire body now. But something stayed his hand. Perhaps it was the fact he had a good forty centimetres and fifty kilos on Torres, though Nelson's money would still be on the half-Klingon to come out of any fight on top. And Vance didn't seem the sort to care about even matches.

Out and out brawls were not uncommon on the _Val Jean_ and often served to clear the air when tempers flared. But Torres was the leader here; she and Vance were not two equals, squabbling over their place in the lunch queue, or the attentions of an admirer. Although the Maquis didn't have a rigid rank structure like Starfleet, and command positions were fluid, those in charge at any one time did have to stand a apart from those in their charge if any sort of authority was going to be exercised.

"If there's food going spare it should be divided equally," Vance shouted, unclenching and lowering his right hand. Torres took a step back from him, and, unconsciously, Nelson edged forwards into the space she'd vacated. But it was claustrophobic enough without them packing in tight as they were, so Nelson backed off again and let his eyes tell Vance just what he thought of the man's attitude. Vance only had eyes for Torres.

"Look at it!" Torres snarled at the pilot, pointing to the sliver of vegetable around which Jor's hand tightened. "There's not enough there to feed a Rafalian mouse let alone share seven ways! We're all hungry, but… really…" and she turned her back on the argument, shaking her head vehemently and wandering out of the way.

Sahreen closed in offering water and calm words. If only he had a bucket of ice. Or the tunnel had ceiling sprinklers.

And then, when Torres had made off out of earshot, Dalby had been coaxed away by Sahreen, and Jor had once again insisted that Nelson take her uneaten food, the unthinkable happened.

"I'm sorry, all right?" Vance said sullenly, but without any hint of sarcasm or insincerity.

Jor's jaw dropped. Tabor's likewise. Nelson choked on his food – quite a feat considering how little had been in his mouth.

Shuffling the feet he was staring down at, Vance continued to probe his injured cheek. Hopefully, Torres hadn't knocked any teeth loose. They were a long way from a dentist. "No harm done," Vance said, though whether he referred to Jor or to his own molars wasn't clear.

Tabor straightened. "No harm done?"

Jor laid a restraining hand on the Bajoran's chest. "Forget it," she directed at Vance, waving him wearily away. "Just… get out of my sight."

Nelson looked in turn to Tabor and then to Jor, astonishment on each of their faces.

"I didn't know he knew the word 'sorry'," Tabor said, quietly enough so as not to draw Vance back.

"You're honoured," Nelson told Jor.

To which she snorted derisively, "I'll try not to get big-headed about it," before shuffling off to find an appropriate spot to rest in, halting after a few only steps to run a hand around to the small of her back, before starting off again.

Nelson didn't need telepathy to read Tabor's mind as the Bajoran stared after her.

..._ _ _...


	6. Chapter 6

**Chapter Six**

_Day four_

_0800_

"If there was ever an example of teamwork, this is it, isn't it?" Nelson babbled. "Can you imagine if we were fewer? How much less progress we would have made?"

Torres, beside him, didn't look over, continuing to scrabble in the dirt to free a stubborn chunk of debris at shoulder height. "I'd really rather not," she said shortly.

Nelson swallowed down his next question. Not that it was really worth saying, in any case. Maybe it was the hunger. Or his worry for Jor. He'd never been one to prattle on when he got nervous, but in the last hour he'd developed a seriously bad case of verbal diarrhoea, and Torres generally did not make the best audience for jibber-jabber. To her credit, she'd tolerated his breathless rambling reasonably well, engaging with him by nodding or shaking her head in all the relevant pauses. A few minutes ago, she'd succinctly suggested that he'd be best to quieten down, to conserve his energy. Her suggestion had barely registered with him, and now, it seemed, she'd reached her absolute limit.

But then she turned to him, her features neutral except for one slightly raised eyebrow. "Does it help to talk? Does it … keep you calm?"

Nelson scratched at the stubble on his chin, the dirt compacted under his short nails pressing in painfully. "Maybe … yes, I think maybe it does."

Torres looked away, then laughed quietly. "Then you carry on. Just don't be offended if I completely ignore you."

It was only a few minutes later that she stopped again, for a different reason. "Is it me or do these rocks feel slightly cooler?" she asked him.

Nelson shuffled over to lay his fingertips on the rock Torres indicated with her own hands. It felt the same as all the others they were gouging out of the heap. "Sorry," he said, shaking his head, but offering an interrogative, "Maybe you're more sensitive to temperature changes than I am."

"Possibly." She waved a hand a few centimetres in front of the obstruction. "But I think I feel cooler air here on my fingers. Just slightly. Or maybe I'm imagining things."

Dalby stepped up behind them to see what the holdup was. Torres continued to probe around, stretching up above her head. If she didn't resume digging soon, Tabor would be along, and Vance too.

"Get me a tricorder," Torres ordered suddenly. Nelson snapped to it, racing back past Tabor and Vance to fetch the device from Jor, not stopping to explain to her what was happening. Besides, he didn't really know what was happening.

Torres ran her scans with an audience, all but Sahreen crowded in behind her. Jor defied orders by getting up to see what was going on. Torres barely noticed, her focus on the tricorder's display. Tabor shushed Dalby and Vance into silence, earning him incensed looks from both men.

When Torres spoke again it was with an air of triumph. "I think we're nearly through," she said, handing over the tricorder for Tabor to examine. Then everyone spoke at once.

"Look here, it says forty three centimetres to the open air."

"Two hours ago the damn thing said the blockage was still two metres thick. We haven't shifted that much rock since."

"Could there have been movement on the outside?"

"It's not using Bolian units of measurement, is it?"

"I calibrated it myself."

"Bloody hell. When I see that Seska, I'm going to tell her just what I think of her sodding equipment."

"Does it really feel cooler up there now?"

"We shouldn't have to calibrate it."

"Let me through so I can see."

Torres raised her hands threateningly. "Shut up. All of you!" she shouted, adding more levelly, "Let's just dig."

"What about … the line?" asked Tabor.

Torres lowered her hands. "Forget controlled and orderly," she returned. "If that tricorder's correct, let's just go for it. Come on." Noting that the outstanding member of the group had arrived on the scene, she called out to him, "Sahreen, get over here. I think we're nearly done."

Vance turned aside to Nelson, muttering, "At last. She's got something to say that I want to hear," and when Torres whirled to send Vance a stare so malevolent that Nelson was convinced it would have a physical follow-up, the pilot just shrugged at her, raising his voice to ask, "Then what are you standing still for, Torres? Let's just dig."

Nelson had no patience for any more of 'Vance versus Torres'. He turned his back on both of them to see Sahreen already delving into the rubble and he moved to join him.

Behind, Vance had moved on to pester Tabor, exclaiming, "And we'll hope to God, or Kahless, or your prophets, that no more of this shit rains down on our heads."

..._ _ _...

_0900_

The moment that they finally broke through to the outside wasn't quite like in the cheesy old disaster holomovies: the ones with names like 'Buried Alive' and 'Escape from the Abyss'. (B'Elanna couldn't understand who would enjoy such ridiculous 'entertainment'.) In those movies, the final breakthrough would be signalled by a glaring shaft of light flooding in to dazzle those who'd been digging in the gloom.

There was no sudden influx of light; it was local night time. But there was an immediate – and very welcome – flow of cool, fresh air, of which B'Elanna inhaled three lungful's before she turned to the others. The sheer relief was overwhelming and topped with no small amount of disbelief that they'd actually done it.

"Breathe deeply, everyone," she said, edging aside from her position under the centre of the head-sized hole, so that the others could see it more clearly. One of the planet's small moons could just be discerned through it: a bright crescent in the dark sky.

There was some restrained cheering. More of a cheerful collective murmur, really. They were all too exhausted to make much of a celebration, and, besides, their job wasn't yet complete. B'Elanna felt a tingle at the back of her neck, a sickening dread that, even now, it could all go horribly wrong for them.

"We've got to widen this hole. Careful now," she said quietly, as if too much noise (or too much optimism) could spark off another shift in the rock that surrounded them.

Rational forethought was discarded for a moment, a fact B'Elanna realised when, in the scramble, a stream of dirt ran in from the sides of the hole hitting Dalby right in the eyes. Then Tabor lost his footing and slipped backwards, Nelson breaking his fall.

"All right, stand back. Let me finish this on my own," B'Elanna snapped, knocking down a number of cobbles and associated gravel to gradually make the hole wide enough to fit her shoulders through. Stepping up onto the mound of loose rubble that she'd just dislodged, she poked her head and shoulders up into the open air, resting her arms on the lip of the surrounding debris on the surface. It was good enough. A tight squeeze for Vance, maybe, but even he'd get through.

With one further push upwards, she could be out. Finally free. It was tempting. But it wouldn't be right for her to be the first to leave. She would step back down and wait for the others to go first, like the captain of a ship under evacuation. It was what Li Paz or Meyer would do. Chakotay, as well.

Allowing herself a small smile at that thought, she took one more deep breath before dropping back … And then she heard Tabor cry out for help, as panicked as she had ever heard him, and her smile was wiped from her face.

..._ _ _...

Tabor's panic wasn't for Jor. Nelson turned to see the Bajoran cradling Sahreen in his arms. Or not so much cradling. Sahreen's head lolled back over Tabor's forearm as Tabor struggled not to drop his limp body.

"He's a lot heavier than he looks," Tabor grunted, lowering Sahreen to the ground and placing two fingers on the side of the unconscious man's neck. Tabor then hovered that same hand over Sahreen's mouth and nose before looking up and around – for Torres, presumably. But she was still extricating herself from their exit point. Tabor settled for addressing Jor, "Pulse is rapid. He is breathing."

Dalby joined the Bajoran in crouching beside Sahreen. Jor thrust a medical tricorder into Dalby's hand before reminding Tabor to put Sahreen into the recovery position. Unable to get an initial reading on the tricorder, Dalby smacked the device with his other hand and tried it again. "What a piece of crap," he grumbled, the exhilaration of a few moments earlier wiped from his face.

Torres elbowed her way past Vance and took the tricorder from Dalby.

Nelson had kept back until now. There wasn't a lot he could do to help that the others couldn't. Now he stepped closer and took a breath. "Try setting it to Vulcan," he said. Five pairs of eyes turned upon him. He scratched his chin with twitchy fingers.

"Seriously?" asked Dalby. "This is no time for jokes."

Nelson swallowed hard. "I'm serious. Try it."

Vance nodded, reaching out a finger to tap the side of the tricorder in Torres's hand. He was lucky she didn't grab the finger and break it right off. "The kid's got a point," Vance said. "Who here ain't wondered if Sahreen ain't a thoroughbred human being?"

Torres frowned at Vance then back at the device. "Setting it to Vulcan won't work either."

"Just try it," Nelson implored her, dropping to his knees and edging in beside Vance.

"Does it work on you?" Jor asked the half-Klingon, catching on to some part of Torres's reasoning that Nelson was missing.

"No," Torres said. "It can't diagnose anyone whose anatomy or physiology deviates from its presets. If I scan myself as human it can't cope with the redundant organs and," she rolled her eyes, "if I scan as Klingon it tells me I've got the Levodian flu."

In any other circumstance, Nelson might have smiled.

"Did he say anything to any of you about feeling unwell?" Torres said sharply, scanning each of their faces. "Did he hit his head?"

A general murmur in the negative answered her questions as she gently parted Sahreen's thick hair to get a close look at his scalp beneath, lifting his head slightly to feel the other side. "I can't see any cuts or swellings," Torres said, shaking her head. "It could be anything – a blood clot or internal bleeding. Damn him. He never complains, and now it means we don't know what the hell's wrong with him."

Suddenly, Nelson remembered, "His headtorch. It was smashed. He must have hit his head."

Torres swore under her breath. "Of course it was. Which is why he's not got it now. But there's no bruising on his forehead, which is weird."

"We'll have to carry him," said Tabor needlessly.

"We have to get out of here right now," said Torres, handing the tricorder back to Jor and getting to her feet.

"I'll carry him," Vance said. Five faces turned upon him in surprise. "What? I'm stronger that any of you lot."

"I just hope that moving him won't exacerbate whatever's wrong with him," said Torres. "But it's our only option." She ran a hand across her brow ridges, eyes narrowing, then she nodded to herself. "Vance, you go and prep the shuttle. The quick launch settings will have powered down by now to conserve power, so the sooner you fire them up, the sooner we can lift off." When the pilot hesitated, she waved him away. "Go! We'll help Sahreen."

"Here," said Jor, handing the pilot his phaser rifle, his rucksack, and his leather jacket.

Whilst Torres had been working alone to finish their escape route, the rest of them had been gathering their gear. The demolitions kits were far too valuable to leave in situ, and although nobody was too fussed about holding onto their filthy clothing and sundries, they shouldn't leave anything behind.

With one last, indecipherable look at Torres, Vance headed out and became the first of the group to leave their home of the last three days.

Torres turned to Jor. "You go, too. Tabor, you help her."

Tabor grabbed his and Jor's belongings, and they followed the pilot.

"Make sure Vance doesn't leave without us," Dalby called to them.

"Do you think he would?" Nelson said with a start. Vance was a total git, but he wasn't that callous, surely.

Torres snorted. "No, of course not. Well, maybe without me. But you'll be OK."

She knelt back down, tried again to rouse Sahreen, speaking his name and tapping his cheek. When he failed to respond to those stimuli, Torres pinched one of his fingers. At that, Sahreen's eyelids flickered, though his eyes remained closed.

"He's responding to pain, at least," she said. "That's one good sign."

Sighing, she then looked to Nelson. "You climb out with your gear. Dalby will throw ours up to you, then we'll lift Sahreen and you'll pull him out the rest of the way. He'll be a deadweight, so be careful."

"I'll manage," Nelson told her, nodding readily. After the exertions of the last three days, how hard could it be?

Torres met his gaze, held it for a brief moment, then nodded herself. "I know you will."

Rising, Nelson took one last look around their temporary prison. He wasn't going to miss the place, but the confinement hadn't been a worthless experience. Not wishing to delay proceedings by searching out his discarded clothing, which Jor had gathered and packed up with the other gear, he merely slung his rucksack onto his back and shouldered his phaser rifle. There'd be time to tidy themselves up when they got on the shuttle, but, in any case, none of them were going to look very presentable before they could find a shower and clean clothes. It wasn't a priority.

He hauled his grimy body up and out of the stifling hole and into the sweetest air that he could ever recall.

..._ _ _...


	7. Chapter 7

**Epilogue**

"So, you obviously got Jor to a medical facility in time," Harry said to B'Elanna, in between forkfuls of his favourite pleeka rind casserole – this batch with extra grub meal and a side of potato chips. B'Elanna failed to see the appeal of grub meal herself. It sounded like something a Ferengi would enjoy.

The mess hall was all but abandoned tonight. Neelix pottered about in the galley working on some recipe for tomorrow's breakfast that required twelve hours to simmer. The fumes that filled the long room were potent enough to dissuade many potential diners, but, having been present before the concoction came to the boil, B'Elanna and Harry had acclimated to the smell gradually, and now they hardly noticed it. Compared to the foul air B'Elanna had just been describing to her friend, the atmosphere in the mess hall was like Risian perfume.

Tom was pulling an extra shift in sickbay this evening. The Doctor had the night off to work on one of his infernal holographic essays. It had given B'Elanna and Harry a good chance to talk about the events of the previous week. Harry had been keen to learn more about B'Elanna's first command experience, and, after giving it some thought, she'd decided that discussing it in detail with him might be cathartic for her too.

B'Elanna smiled tightly and nodded. "We headed straight for Marva IV. There was a doctor there who was sympathetic to the cause, and we'd used him before. He fixed Jor up in about ten minutes after he'd treated Sahreen first." She peered into the mug of hot, watery liquid on the table in front of her, swirled it around to mix in the residue that had settled at the bottom, and took a sip. Thinking back to that disgusting water she and her Maquis comrades had been forced to drink during their 'confinement', Neelix's 'speciality tea' really wasn't so bad. "He'd been walking around with a subdural haematoma for three days and not said a word to anyone about the pain in his head. He was fine after treatment. We were lucky that the Doctor on Marva had experience with patients that had unique physiologies."

"So Sahreen was part-Vulcan?"

B'Elanna smiled even as a wave of regret hit her right in the gut. "I asked Chakotay. When we got back to the _Val Jean_. I said I needed to know in case the same thing happened again. In case Sahreen was under my command and got injured. He told me that next time we'd have Starfleet tricorders, so it was irrelevant. But if I wanted to ask Sahreen, then I was welcome to try."

Harry gawped, pleeka rind and grub meal dripping from his fork to splash into his plate. "And?" he asked eagerly.

B'Elanna winced. "I never did. After that, Chakotay never assigned him to any missions that I led, so I never had a good reason to. But Chakotay knows. Only he swore never to tell."

"What? Why?"

"Sahreen's idea of a joke. I think he enjoyed the thought of keeping us all guessing."

Harry frowned. "That doesn't sound very Vulcan."

"Even Tuvok has a slight sense of humour, and he's as Vulcan as they get." She took another sip of tea. "Who knows. Maybe Sahreen had some Klingon blood. I don't see it, but stranger things have happened."

His plate cleared, Harry sat back in his chair resting his hands on the edge of the table. "How come you've never told me this story before?"

B'Elanna shrugged. "That mission … it wasn't exactly my proudest moment."

"But it turned out all right in the end."

"Through luck more than any particular skill on my part."

"You were in charge. You made the right decisions."

B'Elanna scoffed and swallowed down the dregs of her tea. "I had the right combination of people with me to get the job done. Between them they brought wisdom, patience, and, most importantly, muscle power."

Neelix, ever alert to the needs of his customers, presented with a pot of fresh tea to refill B'Elanna's mug. Feeling daring, Harry had him pour another. The Talaxian looked ready to pull up a chair and join them. B'Elanna wasn't feeling receptive to his well-meaning morale-boosting efforts. A request for two stacks of pancakes soon sent him scurrying back off into the galley with Harry's empty plate. Mixing the batter would occupy the chef for at least ten minutes. More if he started singing and got carried away.

Perhaps picking up on the downturn in her mood, Harry moved the subject onto scientific matters. "Did you ever find out what caused the rock slide?"

B'Elanna shook her head. "No. I didn't even bother examining the sensor readings from the shuttle when we got back to the _Val Jean_. There didn't seem much point given that the sensors were giving us misleading information. I had to work an all-nighter recalibrating them. I guess it could have been our entering the tunnels – you know, the vibrations from our footsteps or the stirring of the wind from the shuttle landing was the tipping point that set off a chain of events causing the rocks to tumble down the mountainside. Like a domino effect. Or a butterfly effect. One of the two. Or some stray electrical charge caused an instability in the uridium. Or it could have just been chance: an act of God, or however you want to label it. We were in the wrong place at the wrong time." She paused to steal a chip from Harry's side plate, contemplating as she crunched it. "But, actually …" and she'd not reflected on it in such a way before, but, "… maybe it was the _right_ place at the _right_ time."

Harry arched an eyebrow. "How so?"

"If we hadn't been stuck there for those three days, then … who knows, we might have been assigned another, more dangerous mission. While the seven of us were digging ourselves out of that hole, Jarvin and Ayala got into trouble during a raid on a Cardassian fuel depot. They barely escaped with their lives. A couple of guys that were with them didn't make it …" She shook off that memory, of Ayala stumbling around the ship with a thousand-yard stare, barely coherent enough to respond to his name or answer a yes/no question. He'd never been quite the same since. "So," she said to Harry, consciously lightening her tone, "just think: if _Voyager_ hadn't just spent the last few days at the mercy of that 'talking bomb' and on the detour to Salina Prime, it's possible something far worse could have happened to us. Another encounter with the Borg, or 8472 …"

Harry's eyebrows rose higher.

B'Elanna frowned at him. "What?"

"Just … I wouldn't expect you to say something like that."

"Like what?"

"Like …" His face took on a slight trace of the panic it had carried so often in the earlier years of _Voyager_'s journey, but that he'd gradually cast aside with the experience. "… like seeing the silver lining in the cloud."

It was a fair point. It wasn't her usual way of thinking. She shrugged. "Maybe it's something in this tea."

B'Elanna took another of his chips, prompting him to push the plate into the centre of the table for her easier access. Over Harry's shoulder, she spied Dalby entering the mess hall with Gerron beside him and Ayala a few paces behind. Neelix sent the men off to a table under the window with a promise that he'd attend to them shortly. All three crewmen offered B'Elanna a nod of acknowledgment that she returned in kind before turning her attention back to Harry, who was ready with his next question.

"So, how come the others weren't with you when the Caretaker pulled your ship into the Delta Quadrant?"

B'Elanna set down her mug now, slid it around until she was happy with its resting position, and then folded her arms across her chest. For the longest time she'd envied Sahreen, Nelson and Vance, and the others who'd stayed behind on that fateful day: Li Paz, Meyer and Roberto. Atara and Sveta. She'd thought of them often during her first couple of years on _Voyager_, wondering how long they would have searched for the _Val Jean_. Knowing that, statistically speaking, a few of them might have been killed or captured, but, if so, at least they'd have died or been imprisoned for fighting a war that they believed in.

Not led to their deaths by a Starfleet captain fighting enemies that they should have had no quarrel with. She'd hoped that they were still in the fight, that perhaps the Maquis had grown in number and influence. Until just over a year ago, when Chakotay had approached her in engineering with the worst possible news.

"After that away mission, Vance was reassigned to another ship. I never saw him again. The day before Gul Evek chased us into the Badlands, Chakotay had sent Sahreen, Nelson and a couple of others to restock one of our weapons caches near Bajor. They were supposed to rendezvous with us after a couple of weeks."

"And now they're all definitely … gone?" Harry asked softly.

B'Elanna paused. Were they? All of them? Sveta wasn't one to overdramatize a situation. If Sveta said that all the Maquis were wiped out or in prison, then Sveta believed it. But she couldn't possibly know about every one of the thousands of individuals who had called themselves Maquis. "I suppose it's possible that a few of us managed to blend back into civilian life somehow," B'Elanna said. "On Bajor or in the Federation. I don't know about Vance, but I do know that Sahreen and Nelson didn't make it. Sveta – Chakotay's friend who wrote him – she … saw their bodies. That's how she got picked up by Starfleet. She and a couple of others responded to Sahreen's distress call, and Starfleet intercepted them. In her letter, she mentioned quite a few of those killed by name."

"I'm sorry," Harry said simply.

B'Elanna nodded. "Sahreen would have made a good officer. Nelson too. You would have liked them."

"The other guy, Vance," Harry continued, before hesitating, that trace of unease returning to him for a moment. "He sounds like he might have struggled to fit in."

B'Elanna swallowed hard. If Vance had made it to _Voyager_ it would definitely have made life … interesting. That was to say more interesting than the journey had been already. The thought of seventy years with him did not appeal to her. Of course, on _Voyager_, Vance might have changed his attitude. Starfleet methodology had cured more than a few crewmen of their volatile tempers and general insolence. And Vance hadn't always been as much of an ass as he'd been on that botched mission and in the lead up to it … "Better that he'd been on _Voyager_ struggling to fit in than dead," she decided.

Dalby had struggled at first. But since Tuvok's intensive training course in 'the Starfleet way of doing things', Dalby's conduct had been exemplary. Commendable, at least. None of the complaints about him were serious enough for B'Elanna to refer them on to Tuvok or Chakotay. She took care over who she assigned Dalby to work with, trying not to mix him with others prone to losing their temper. That minimised any trouble. In fact, she often placed him and Jor – who was another invaluable member of the engineering team – under Tabor's supervision. When B'Elanna saw the three of them working together on some problem, memories of those days digging in the darkness couldn't fail to resurface.

But in recent months, she'd stopped trying to suppress those memories, deciding that if she was never going to see Sahreen or Nelson (or even Vance) again, she should make sure she didn't forget the times they'd shared, good or bad.

"And now, commiserating with Harry over the sentient missile fiasco had given her cause to revisit that first command of her own in more detail than she ever had before – and to appreciate the wisdom she had gained from that ordeal and from knowing those people that had shared it with her."

The corners of her mouth twitched upwards slightly. It didn't pass Harry's notice. She answered his puzzled look by reaching for her mug and gesturing for him to do the same with his.

"We should raise a toast," she said quietly, lifting the mug as she decided on her phrasing. "Here's to … learning from experience."

Harry smiled, clinking his mug to hers as he echoed the sentiment.

Yes, this talk had been a very good idea. For both of them.

* * *

A/N: Sahreen and Nelson (and Li Paz and Meyer) are mentioned (and seen in holographic form) in 5x03 "Extreme Risk". Vance is mentioned (and vaguely seen) in the DS9 episode 5x23 "Blaze of Glory".


End file.
